Black & White

"Don't let the high reviews fool you!"

The God sim aspect of the game is a flop. The best way to describe this game is a virtual pet hiding behind a god sim concept. Those wanting something like populous will be very disappointed, but those that liked those $10 virtual pets might like spending $50 for a virtual pet with very nice graphics.

Gameplay-4
Gameplay is two basic parts, there is training your creature, and there is spreading your influence to other villages. You take control of villages by performing godly miracles to impress the people. The better you take care of the village the higher the population goes, the larger your sphere of influence gets, thus you can perform miracles far enough away to start impressing the next village. Each Village requires a freaking insane amount of micro managing, it can take over an hour just to get your first village's belief up high enough to start taking over the next village.
The micro managing is so high it's impossible to maintain more than one successful village at a time. In fact, the 3rd level took me 8 hours to complete. Don't be fooled by the time it takes to complete; it doesn't take long because its challenging, or because the computer opponent is out witting you and countering your moves (In fact the computer starts out with a set number of cities and just sits there waiting to be killed). The level's take long for no other reason than that it's horribly repetitive and tedious. Online play is impossible due to the boring gameplay and tedious amount of time it takes, it's really only for showing off your creature.

Control-7
They wanted to be unique by having a control system that uses nothing but the mouse. It has mixed results...
I like that there is no interface or command buttons blocking your view, but I would have settled for the option to turn on the buttons when I got tired of all the mouse movement.
Some miracles are very hard to preform because you have to move your mouse in a certain pattern to produce the effect.
The view is equally hard to change using special mouse movements.
As for control of your villages.... well you will have to control EVERY LITTLE DETAIL about them. You have to tell each individual what to do or they will just sit and stare at the sunset. This could have been made much easier if the AI was even half as good as your creatures. But at this point I would settle for a command menu to help make managing villages easier. But it's more than Simple telling your villagers what to do, you also have to manage your villagers food and wood supply. The food isn't so bad, you can make farms which will regenerate. But farms require A LOT of wood to make, and wood runs out very fast. The ultimate in micro management is this; When the wood supply runs out after 5 minutes you have to start manually watering trees so the will grow more trees. this is a painstaking process that takes constant management through the entire game.

One aspect of the game I thought might be fun was battling your creature against another, unfortunately the clumsy mouse interface doesn't make it easy. Both of your creatures walk into a circle on the ground and the battle starts, you then have to click on the area of the creature you want to attack. Sounds easy enough, but try clicking on those tiny limbs when the camera is automatically spinning in circles around the creatures, and the creatures are dodging up and down. Most often you will end up clicking the ground, this will make your creature dodge constantly and he will take a lot of damage simply because of the interface.

Stability-7
The game shipped as an unfinished game. The multiplayer aspect has to be released as a patch later on after the release. And there was a bug in level 5 that made it unplayable for weeks. Other than the fact that the game was in development for over 4 years and all they gave us was an advanced virtual pet I'd say it's pretty stable.

Graphics-10
These Graphics are very impressive. The terrain is a breathtaking sight, and the creatures look life like. And in offline play you will almost never experience a slow down when there is a lot going on at once. This is uncommon in todays games, with such high performance PC's out there most game developers have gotten lazy about optimizing their code for good performance (ala Tribes 2). I was also very impressed with the damage system for buildings, the level is detail is amazing. When you toss a rock at a building it will collapse around the area where the rock was thrown.

In conclusion, don't buy this if you want a god sim. The god sim fails on all counts. The creature aspect is the games only worthwhile feature. Buy this game if what you've always wanted was a virtual pet you could battle with others online.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/17/01, Updated 06/17/01