Populous: The Beginning

"Warning!, crazy natives ahead!"

If I am not wrong this is the third Populous game, even if it is called The Beginning, I have never played any other of the series, so I am not going to be able to compare.

Populous III lacks the huge amount of units and buildings other real time strategy games have, but instead of that offers a gameplay never seen before, five minutes into the game and you’ll realize why.

The structures available in Populous are very few, also the number of units is very limited, but the units are so wacky that their number is not important, Populous would be a fun game even with two units only. To obtain units you will have to convert them with your Shaman. Once we have converted some of those natives that just wanted to live peacefully in their uncorrupted land, in order to make them military units we have to train them in barracks, we have to make them enter the building and then after some time they will came out turned into a military unit, to make priests we will have to make them enter into a temple and so on. Once they become warriors or any other military units they wont be able to build structures anymore, so keep that in mind.

To build thins we will only need wood, there are a lot of trees scattered everywhere and in any case they grow again after sometime, so the resources are not a problem in this game. The Mana is a key element, with it your Shaman will be able to cast spells, included the Convert spell, needed to obtain followers.

As I said before the units are unbelievable wacky, for example, there are priests that can convert enemy units to your side, when enemy units sees this guy (your priest) they will immediately sit down and start to listed to the stories the priests tells them, like one of those grandfathers from the movies telling stories to little children they will start to listen like morns until they are finally become one of yours.

Our Shaman, aside from recruiting units (maybe “recruit” is not the exact word, but well), he is able to cast spells, and needless to say that his spells are hilarious, for example he can cast a swarm of insects, and when does that all the enemies will start to run shouting desperately (but in a very funny way) in all the directions, or when we cast a Lighting spell they’ll burn their butts and start to run again like rabid monkeys. Then, when there is one of your units next to the Shaman, they will start to worship him making very funny reverences. There are some more crazy units, but I don’t want to spoil anything else.

The game is presented entirely in 3D (excepting for the units, which are sprites), you can fully rotate the camera and make all the zooms you want, I am not very fond of 3D graphics, but they fine with this game. The music is ok and the voices are superbly hilarious, but not very varied sadly.

Aside from the lack of building ad units, another problem The Beginning has is that we don’t have any other tribes to choose from, there is only one, you and your enemy are the same, the same units, the same spells, and the same everything, there should have been at least two different tribes.

Populous: The Beginning is the most wacky real time strategy game out there, very amusing, and while it lacks all the options and it is not as deep as the rest of the games of the genre, is still a great choice if you are tired of the usual Command & Conquer and WarCraft clones. Let us all adore Populous III !!!

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/26/03