Chaos Overlords is a superficially nondescript game, but take the time to master it and you'll be rewarded with a deep, challenging and rewarding turn-based strategy. The game revolves around establishing an economy to hire and outfit an army of gangs, while defending your territories and expanding your boundaries. Chaos Overlords has an outstanding soundtrack but it's not a visually impressive game by the standards of TBS games of its era (Chaos Overlords was released in 1996, the year of MoOII, CivII and HoMMII). The city setting is abstracted to a grid and combat animations are represented by static dummies. In spite of its dry presentation, Chaos Overlords is surprisingly immersive. The thumbnail gang portraits and descriptions are wonderfully evocative and the game is very good at creating intense border conflicts and shifting boundaries. GOG's re-release is not the HD overhaul Chaos Overlords fans might have hoped for. The game plays like an emulated 1996 release - a 640x480 screen floating in the middle of your widescreen monitor, with none of the click-intensive GUI quirks ironed out and no windowed support. None of the rough edges matter to me though, I'm just glad to see this underappreciated gem find a permanent home. If you're a fan of TBS and cyberpunk I highly recommend checking it out.
