For those of y'all that remember the Dungeon Keeper franchise, this might seem like a familiar theme. You're the evil overlord of the land where heroes had banished evil, destroyed your Dark Tower, & scattered you minions to the four winds. Then you get resurrected or wake up or something & decide to go kick some elf & halfling ass. Think of a Dungeon Keeper theme mixed w\ a Fable/Dynasty Warriors engine. You are the general of your personal army of goblin-lookin' mofos of varying colours (& abilities). You can give them basic commands & they are actually your main weapon (sweep them across the screen w\ the right thumbstick). In fact, they're downright necessary as they're small enough to access places you cannot personally go. Along the way you can rebuild your tower, forge new weapons for yourself, earn new spells, etc. The minions are relatively intelligent, but somewhat awkward to control, as you can only effectively command one group of them at a time. They're at least smart enough to pick up weapons/armour on the ground when they walk over them & upgrade if the new item is an improvement over the status quo.
The spirit of this game is precisely that of Dungeon Keeper. Not only do you get to smite heroes, but some of the fuckers deserve it. The populous in general isn't fond of some of the more annoying aspects of the "heroic" races & usually welcomes you kicking the shit out of them. The forces of good are generally presented as inept, corrupt, or otherwise harmful to the plebes of the world.
The controls can be fucking a pain, especially if you're used to using the right thumbstick to change camera angles. The minion control is touchy, too. There's only so much leeway between "go over there & distract that huge sea serpent" & "go over there & attack that huge sea serpent." The latter, of course, results in death. Your plebes are only all too happy to go jihad kamikaze, though.
Minions are also raw materials, in a fashion. You can sacrifice them in health or mana pits to replenish your personal pools. In addition, the more minions you sacrifice in the creation of your personal weapons/armour, the more powerful that item is. Getting more minions isn't exactly hard, but it's fucking time consuming, especially when you need to blow up the numbers of all four separate types to get the proper sacrificial numbers to forge some kick-ass sword.
Also, there's this thing called a corruption percentage. There's two very different types of evil being played to here. The zero percent corruption level is the one achieved by killing halflings, elves, unicorns, etc., w\o killing the peons roaming the countryside. The one hundred percent corruption rating means you are Sauron incarnate & prefer mass slaughter & wanton destruction of everything you see.
One of the noticeable things missing here is a map of any sort. Even a fucking minimap in the screen corner would've been welcome. The second gaping hole is the lack of a jump command. Every now & then, you & your minions get in a minor entanglement that a third dimension of movement would render trivial, but a mere two is troublesome on occasion. Course, this shit also kills jump puzzles. But this seems more than made up for by the inclusion of minion-control puzzles.
I didn't get to play around for more than a couple hours & I don't think my buddy is that far, so maybe I just saw the nice, fluffy early goings, but it seems to be a fun game thus far. My playing will be sporadic at best as I got to drive o'er to my friend's place to get near the 360. As I understand, it's also out for the PC.