I have an Acer Aspire One, with a nine and a half inch screen [I believe, I'm estimating here]. I can't run a lot of things, so I usually run REALLY OLD things [like WOLF and The Lion King for DOS, amongst others]. I had to set WQ to the "Good" setting or below. If your game overheats, it might help to change the graphics settings to see if any of them work out better.
If it still overheats on even the fastest setting, it might be your computer. Or it could even depend on what you do. I know that I can't go online because WolfQuest connects you to the computer of whoever's hosting the game, and I believe that you piggyback on their connection [I think that's how it works. All I know is they don't run it like other games run online stuff], and for some reason every game I would join always had a crappy connection, and my game would eventually freeze /shrug
All I know is I can run Windows Media Player, seven windows of Firefox, at most four open Gimp files [at 1024x1024 pixels], and WolfQuest Single Player all at the same time without any problems. o_e