Black & White 2 (PC DVD)

Let's start with the best part: the graphics. Black and White 2 is certainly pretty, with impressive landscapes that you can view both up close (complete with grass that you can brush aside with your godly hand) and from a long, long way away. The creatures are all unique and quite loveable in their own way (I'm particularly fond of the cow), and will take on a more good or evil appearance depending on how you raise them. The various sparkles, miracle effects, buildings and such also look rather nice; in particular, the volcano miracle is certainly a joy to behold. On the whole, you really can't fault the game's looks.

So what went wrong? The biggest and easiest thing to point out is the distinct lack of play options. There is the single player campaign... and that's it. No multiplayer, no skirmish mode against AI gods, no sandbox mode and, just to rub salt into the wound, there isn't even a difficulty option for the campaign -- so, once you've beaten it (and it is incredibly easy to beat), there really isn't anything else to do. Six months after release and there's still no sign of any modding tools, which might have helped increase the longevity slightly. Not great value for money.

Black and White 2 makes a big deal out of letting you play as good or evil: "Be a god of war or a god of peace." The problem is that neither approach is particularly satisfying. When taking the "peace" approach, you build up your town in order to "impress" the nearby neutral villages. Sadly, this approach feels like a poor-man's version of SimCity. When taking the "war" approach, you take neutral villages by force and use your armies to overwhelm the enemy, and this approach makes the game feel like a particularly poor real-time strategy game, especially because there are so few unit types -- soldiers, archers and catapults, and that's it. The enemy AI doesn't help here either, being entirely predictable and extremely unchallenging as it is content to simply send wave after wave of its brainless troops to their deaths at the hands of your army/creature.

The creature also seems more "robotic" now, in that the activities it can perform are listed within one of the game's menus. It looks like a sequence of on/off switches; to flip a switch to "on" (i.e. to encourage it do perform that activity), you stroke the creature; to flip a switch to "off", you slap the creature. There doesn't seem to be any of the teaching by demonstration that there was in the first game, where you could get your creature to learn miracles or activities by performing them within its gaze. This feeling is compounded by the fact that you buy "upgrades" for the creatures to enable it to do things like water crops, throw fireballs, etc.

Despite negative feedback from the first game, the second game still features the same (unskippable, although the huge patches fix this) style of tutorial; namely, one which treats the player like a simpleton. "Well done, you've moved the camera to the right," the advisor notifies you, "...now let's move it to the left!" Meanwhile, a number of important game concepts that are considerably less obvious are completely ignored, both by the built-in tutorials and the game's manual.

The tutorial also introduces you to the somewhat inaccurate controls, whereby you'll try to click on something (either to pick up a particular object, or simply to move/rotate the camera around a given point), only to realise that the game thinks you've clicked in a different spot. This results in the tutorial becoming upset and treating you like even more of an idiot or, later in the game, the wrong objects ending up carried in your hand, which can become highly frustrating.

And, of course, the game's graphics come at a cost; you'll need a decent machine to play the game acceptably. In particular, ensure that your graphics card supports pixel shader 1.1, as the game won't run at all without it. A number of users have also complained of performance issues when using GeForce 6600/6800 cards, and to my knowledge these issues are still unresolved.

There are persistent rumours of an upcoming expansion for the game, and perhaps the best advice I can give is to wait for it to be released before deciding whether to purchase this title. At the moment it feels incomplete and underwhelming, and you'll probably end up wishing that you'd waited for the game and its expansion to be bundled together at a lower price.

The game is like a non-stop tutorial with the never-ending unfunny banter between the two conscience sides having lost all trace of humour. The pathing of the civilians is poor, the creature AI is simplistic but has had all learn-by-example removed.

To gain powers and new buildings you have to 'buy' them with 'tribute' earned throughout the game by achieving nonsensical tasks (gather 5000 wood, make 20 breeders (ie drop 20 people down together). The silver-scroll tasks are badly scripted and almost insulting in their simplicity and stupidity. (Throw a rock at the 3 rocks to move them - why not just pick up the 3 rocks? Oh, and several are still broken).

The creature skill systems SEEMS like a good idea with varying degrees of how much it should avoid or continue doing tasks but it quickly becomes a switch-on-or-off for various actions item, and they're too brainless. The combat AI is quite pathetic as well, with armies standing there staring at a wall rather than run around it to get to their opponents. The aspect of other gods has been removed and replaced with hearing a non-stop diatribe of the opposing human leaders opinions of EVERY action you take.

I felt when playing that it was a free-form version of Settlers with a creature with few trainable actions to do and no fun powers as a god coming along until you were deep into the 3rd level.

The game really is a miss. Its pretty, and had so much potential, and I wanted SO badly to like it and have been looking forward to it for over two years - but its let me down considerably. This is a great example of a game that has great graphics and nothing to do with them...