Black & White 2

"Against Boredom, Even the Gods Struggle In Vain"

Lionhead had a lot riding on the original Black and White, especially since it was their first title. Hoping to make a big splash, the studio went into the game with a lot of big and innovative ideas. While it was a remarkable accomplishment at first glance, closer scrutiny quickly revealed it to be a mess of ill thought out ideas and poorly implemented mechanics. All in all, their first effort was a classic case of “reach exceeds grasp”. But the game was full of cool ideas and thankfully Lionhead decided to give it another shot. Regrettably their second attempt is no better than their first, but for entirely different reasons (and definitely not for lack of trying).

Players are once again thrust into the shoes of a god and just in time to see a Greek society destroyed by a horde of rampaging Aztecs. After trying to slow them down, you open a portal to help some Greeks escape. After arriving on a peaceful island, it's time to rebuild and hunt down the god who orchestrated the slaughter.

The driving concepts behind Black and White 2 are nearly the same as in the first game, but nearly everything has gotten a major overhaul. While this should have been a good thing, Lionhead has largely tossed out one set of issues and brought in another. While Black and White 2 is superficially the same game as its predecessor, these changes have turned it into something else entirely. Things like the creature, taking over towns and building all return but as you spend time with the game, you'll discover that it all works much differently than before. The creature, a major mechanic in the first game is now little more than a novelty which can be used or completely disregarded. And the concept of taking over towns is now related to how you build, which ultimately makes Black and White 2 a city-builder rather than a god game.

As with the first game, taking over villages is still a very important part of the game. However, the player does not take a direct hand in this (meaning you, as god, won't be directly vying for their belief). Instead, villages will now join your cause solely based on how impressed they are with your village. Impressing other villages basically entails building as many structures as possible in order to lure them away from their pathetic little hovels. Naturally, there's a bit more to it than that, as each building has its own impressiveness score which is added after the structure is built and you can get extra points for the overall organization of a town.

It's very important to note that the act of building has been completely revised from its former incarnation. Previously, building was an absolute hassle as it entailed gathering lumber to create scaffolds, then combining scaffolds in order to create a certain building type. From there you then had to gather enough resources to build it. Lionhead has made the smart decision and streamlined the whole process so you can simply pick out your desired building from a menu. From here the citizens will build it up using resources they've gathered, or you can intervene and simply pluck up resources from the landscape and drop them on construction sites to build yourself (which is much faster).

Eventually your village will become impressive enough to lure away the residents of other areas, and they'll march across the land until reaching the borders of your land. If you're so inclined, you can let them in.

There is, however, a much simpler and more direct route to gaining the loyalty of the people; conquer them. It is now possible to build military structures that will allow you to recruit soldiers, archers and siege units. After these buildings have been built, just grab the flag on top, drop it somewhere and male citizens will dutifully run to the recruitment tent and join up. You can then send these squads off to convert people the old fashioned way (believe or die!). This route is so much quicker than trying to impress people that you can take over a land in a fourth of the time it would take to build up a city. Of course to do this properly, you'll have to have all your ducks in a row with citizens working tirelessly to produce enough materials to keep up with the demands of your soldiers.

While this route is definitely quicker, it presents a new set of problems. First and foremost, trying to get an attack coordinated is almost impossible due to the user-hostile controls. You can only select one squad at a time and give them only the most basic of commands (go, attack). Then there is the problem of AI, which causes squads to be mindlessly stupid, often letting enemies waltz just feet by them or getting wiped out by an inferior force. As if that wasn't enough you'll also have to deal with the cheating AI. Whereas it will take you quite a long time to create a population large enough to support a decent sized army, the opponent can instantly create a new squad of units each time one is destroyed.

Regardless of which path you take to domination, you'll earn Tribute points along the way. Tribute points are sort of like Belief from the first game, but you'll get these after building or conquering (and through missions). Tribute is basically the currency of the game and it will allow you to buy new building types as well as an assortment of other random items.

As I've already mentioned, the creatures do make a return although they're much less important this time around. This is unfortunate because they're much smarter and capable of learning quicker. At the start of the game players will choose from either an Ape, Lion, Wolf or Cow. Once again, the creature basically serves as your physical avatar in the mortal realm and can do all sorts of actions, such as gathering resources, building and fighting enemies. But because progression really revolves around building, the creature really doesn't have a function. Sure it can be a help when it gathers resources but unlike the first game, using it is not necessary.

Another big change is with the alignment system. In the first game your alignment was pretty much determined by what you did during missions. Now it's a combination of what players build and what they do. For instance if you build nice houses and a nursery for children, you're probably a nice guy. On the other hand torture pits and severed heads on stakes seems to lean towards the darker side. This is all well and good until you try to build a military building and you start becoming evil. So… good guys can't create soldiers to defend themselves with? How stupid is that?

One of the things that hasn't changed about the game is the mouse controls. The game is meant to be played using only the mouse which invariably complicates actions that are easier using a keyboard. For instance, moving the camera up or down involves holding the middle mouse button and moving up or down. But it's still possible to use a combination of mouse and keyboard and I'd still recommend this.

The only real area I see any improvement in, at least in regards to the gameplay itself, is with the menus. The first game used a clean, HUDless interface and while it was a nice idea, it made getting important information a pain in the ass. Now, there is a small bar that can be pulled up at the bottom of the screen that contains all the important info, such as what buildings you have at your disposal, what the creature has learned, and a variety of other things.

Thankfully the graphics have been very much improved since the first game. Everything looks great and the hair effects for creatures is excellent. There are also lots of little touches that give the game a little extra flair, such as grass that moves when people walk through it and you can even zoom close enough to see the stones that make up roads. The draw distance is also excellent and even at maximum zoom (with the whole island visible) there's still a lot of detail. While it's still a little dated by today's standards the game still looks very impressive. The audio is similarly polished. The original voice actors for advisors return and the soundtrack is made up of ethereal Middle-Eastern tinged music.

THE VERDICT
Even though Black and White has seen a major overhaul for its sequel, it's not exactly better. More polished? Definitely. More user-friendly? Oh, yeah. Better? Not so much. Perhaps it's the shift in focus that has made the game into little more than a city-builder (a genre which has saturated the PC market to the breaking point in recent years) or the fact that the new mechanics really don't work much better than the old ones. As it stands, Black and White is just a series that Lionhead never could get to work the way they wanted it to, which is a shame because there's definitely a lot of potential here.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/30/09

Game Release: Black & White 2 (US, 10/04/05)