Azilut: I'm going to start this mini-review by going on a seemingly irrelevant tangent. When I was but a lad, I went through the usual "dinosaur phase", and had a box stuffed to the brim with toy dinosaurs. Most were little more than monochrome bricks and blobs of neon plastic, but that didn't matter - my imagination filled in the details and provided prehistoric battles of awesome savagery! When more advanced toys started coming out - ones with electronic roars and removable "battle damage" and the like - I couldn't stop thinking how much more awesome they would be, if I was already getting so much mileage out of little blobby bricks. But when I finally got my hands on them, I learned to my disappointment that some vital ingredient of the magic had gone missing - somehow, defining the characteristics of a dinosaur like the sound of its roar took the job away from my imagination instead of enhancing it, and turned a terrifying beast back into a lump of plastic.

What does this have to do with Chaos Overlords? Well, graphically, it's the computer gaming equivalent of mashing little plastic toys together while making "Grrrr!" noises - art assets are minimal, and combat is depicted via a little silhouette animation that is exactly the same for every unit. Yet somehow, between the surprisingly flavourful gang portraits and the often comedic little descriptions, the game provides juuuuuuuust the right amount of detail to convince my imagination to step in and light my brain on fire! I have enormous fun imagining my Dennis-The-Menace style gang of nerdy science kids crouched behind a burning garbage can, blasting their hand-phasers at pursuing mafiosos and mad cultists, or picturing a gang of orcish brutes punching my Clown gang over and over again only to have them weeble back upright with an absurd honking sound, or imagining the shuddering footfalls of my elite Ground Zero shock troops as they sweep the ruined city streets for those last few pesky rent-a-ninjas. For all its graphical simplicity, Chaos Overlords gets me involved in its world in a way that most multi-million-dollar, dinosaur-roaring AAA titles could never hope to match.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the gameplay is also highly addictive. Dangerously addictive. Chaos Overlords has this insidious little cycle going where once you know the system, issuing a command to a single gang takes less than a second, but still gives you that little jolt of satisfaction when you feel like you've made progress towards a goal. It's easy to convince yourself to just give orders to a few more gangs (it'll literally only take a few seconds). But eventually you've issued orders to all your gangs, and then of course you immediately want to click "End Turn" to see how those orders play out. And then you watch all this stuff happen and that bastard Green player is trying to move in on your territory and you want to respond to it right away by issuing more orders! So you keep going around and around until eventually you black out and suddenly it's next Thursday and oh my God do I still have a job or a family?

Finally, I'll once again note that the soundtrack is nothing short of awesome.

mondo84: Congrats to the winners and thanks again to Azilut!

triock: This.