Populous: The Beginning

"Just another game that proves a crazy name equals a good game"

The first time I played Populous: The Beginning, I was blown away by it's awesome graphics and sound. I still love this game today.

Populous follows the same principles of any other god game, except for the spell casting feature. Your shaman (the leader of your tribe) is a very magical being, she has the ability of casting many different kinds of spells (like volcano, hypnotize, blast, lighting, magical shield, and many more). The game follows a simple, easy way of building, training, and collecting new members for your tribe. It has a very useful built in tutorial if you are playing for the first time. The difficulty is staying alive long enough to build a strong enough army to take out the other tribes, strategy plays a huge role in this game.

Building a village requires the same thing any other primitive village would need, lots of flat land and plenty of trees. It gives the game another challenge, the trees usually are worth about four or five stacks of wood each. The amount of would is eventually depleted in your area, even faster if your on an island. Plus this isn't like Age of Empires either you can't just chop down wood and have it go to some untouchable, invisible place, what I'm saying is, until you use wood to build something it's anyone's game. Luckily wood does not often create that much of a problem though, and after long enough the trees will grow back. The town itself can consist of: huts, guard towers, temples, spy, warrior and fire warrior training centers, ports, an air balloon building centers.

The music is always a slow paced soothing kind of music that usually sounds very good with the surroundings. The sound aren't much but the sound pretty good. Each different class in your tribe has a different sound effects .

The graphics are a very good part of this game. The tribe members look pretty cool, and the animation is smooth and is thought out well. The cut-scenes are few, but the look very good and tell the story at the beginning well. Sheer cliffs in the game are not very good looking, they're pretty much just straight down with blotches of color on them. When villagers walk over the same spot over and over again it creates a distinguishable path on the ground.

The story-line is not very complicated. There are for different tribes, each ones shaman wants to be a god. So you must crush all of the other tribes on 24 different planets. Then the 25th level has a very cool finale

Battle strategy plays a huge part in this game. In later parts of the game keeping a town is tricky let alone make an army. There are six different kinds of classes in your tribe, each with different strengths and weaknesses. -Braves are the backbone of your tribe, the don't serve well in combat but they are the ones that build your village, collect wood and build the buildings to create all other classes (except the shaman). Braves are also the raw material for making other soldiers.
-Warriors are always helpful, they are stronger then any other kind of tribe member, more then five times the strength of average braves. They are great for knocking down defenses.
-Preachers are invaluable to your tribe, they aren't very strong but cannot be attacked head on by anyone except another preacher or a shaman. When any other tribe member goes near a preacher they will sit down and listen to them. After long enough the enemy will turn over to your side.
-Firewarriors are very useful as the archers of your tribe. The are capable of firing fireballs at long range and are very useful for shooting down air balloons.
-Spies are very cool, to any other tribe they look like any other brave, but you see them as cloaked figures that can change their color to look like any other tribes then sneak past their defenses. Spies are very weak in combat so they should stay hidden at all costs, they have the ability of setting things on fire. You can torch the opponents lumber supply then take out their village. Just take out as much as you can before he gets discovered.
-The shaman is a very unique member of your tribe, she is the leader of your tribe and is very hard to kill. She isn't much stronger then the average brave but she makes up for that in magic spells. She is very dangerous and annoying to other tribes, and when killed if any other members of your tribe are still alive she will be resurrected in 30 seconds.

I love this game it has it's flaws, and at times it can drive you mad, but it is still one of the greatest god-games out there. The name is kind of crazy though, I don't know where they thought of it but it sounds cool. Populous is cheap and is well worth the money. It's even better online, so don't wait get populous today.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/11/02, Updated 07/11/02