Black & White

"The most anticipated game turns a TRAGEDY!!! And a tragedy of online reviews!"

Black and White is my most anticipated game for over two years. It is developed by Lionhead which has the guys who designed Syndicate, Populous and Dungeon Keeper, all of them being my all time favorites. So when I finally got my hands on this game, I just can't wait to install it to finally try it out. And for the first five minutes after the installation, it seemed that finally something has not only fulfilled, but actually surpassed the high hype. However, all's not well from then on, as the game remained intriguing for about 3 hours, then the excitement gradually and steadily declined and the fun is no more. Yes, this game has almost everything, great graphics, awesome music and sound effects, innovative gameplay, but it somehow lacks the most important thing about a game, the fun. After about ten hours the game becomes downright boring and tedious, and I fought for 40 hours before finally realized that Lionhead actually released a mess of a software product.

The graphics, the music and the sound effects are all almost perfect, and the introduction part is really great. However, the game is simply no fun because of a number of things.

1) Bugs! LOADS of them! There are a lot of bugs and incompatibility issues that the game won't even run on a lot of system (Voodoo Banshee users beware, it's now officially announced that the game is incompatible with the graphics card despite the claims in its readme file). I'm lucky in that my system config got only a few minor problems that some config tweak solved most of them.

2) Game design problems. Sure the idea is great and innovative, I mean how many games tried to pack strategy, Sim, RPG, pet-raising and some fighting elements into one package? And then despite the complexity of the game system, they decided to take a minimalistic design in the interface department. The end result is that the interface is almost non-existent and although at first it sounds good and easy to learn, soon it becomes just tedious and confusing. Also I believe they just tried too hard to pack everything into one game that it becomes something more than they can chew. And worse yet, they decided to force you play the tutorials each time you start a new game, which takes about 5-8 hours to finish, and it is downright boring after the first time.

3) Gameplay problems. The game sounds great in concept, but ends up quite boring after the first hour appreciating the awesome graphics and music. The Creature raising and magic system is simply no fun after a while.

4) Bad documentation and support. The manual is simply useless except being a rather interesting read. But it helps little in playing the game. And the customer support, well, they have promised a patch that should be released two months ago... and it's still in beta stage.

All in all, don't listen to the good reviews over the web, those irresponsible guys must have played less than two hours before writing their reviews. I mean there are reviews everywhere even before the game got released! Avoid this game like plague now, and after the patch, you can consider it, but still with caution. there are some good reviews which have been posted a few weeks after the game was released (which means they have actually played the game for some time), like the ones in www.firingsquad.com and www.cgonline.com, you should definitely read those reviews before consider buying the game!!!

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/14/01, Updated 06/14/01