Afterlife

"This game is a blight on the land!"

This game is a blight on the land!

One of the most revered classic games out there, SimCity, has been cloned a great many times. Some games, such as Caesar, work quite well, others, such as this dreadful game, Afterlife, fall flat on their face and die. And then they go to hell.

Afterlife places you in the shoes of Demiurge, a sort of intermediary from the Powers That Be (God), who is given the assignment of running the Afterlife of a local planet. To assist in running things, you are given two advisors, an angel and a devil, who each tell you when the pot boils over in their respective realms.

On screen the map is divided like this, at the top you have Heaven, below that is your planet, and below that is Hell. Looking closer at the map, you'll see that both heaven and hell are completely flat, have no land (it's sort of a ''void''), some rocks, and some ''rivers''. I have no problems with the game up to this point. Unfortunately, the game has to actually start at some point.

To get people (they have a clever sounding name for people, that's an acronym, but I can't recall it offhand) into your afterlifes, you must build Gates in both Heaven and Hell. Each Gate can only move so many people through at any given time. The basic gate, can hold a little, and the next two gates can hold more. So, if a lot of people die, and you have only the basic Gate, you'll have a bottleneck of people trying to get into the afterlife. Next you must build a road in each Realm, a nice ordered road in Heaven, and a chaotic road in Hell. Here comes my first problem with the game, roads require maintenance, and to get an effective road in Hell, you have to have a large road in Hell, which sucks up money like you wouldn't believe. This actually leads to my greatest complaint in the game, but we'll get to that later.

Next you must ''zone'' out 7 areas (8 if you count the ''generic'' zoning) for each of the 7 Sins and Virtues for Hell and Heaven respectively. As the people come out of the gate, and down the path, they'll each go to the zone where they belong (a Humble soul getting into the Humble zone, a Proud soul into the Proud zone, etc.). If you don't have enough of a zone, they'll stay on the path and complain loudly. However, not all souls just want to stay in one zone, they'll want to wander about, these are called ''Temporary Souls''. And because each zone is a mix of Permanent and Temps, you have to Balance each and every building on each and every zone. Imagine, if you will, playing SimCity and having to check each and every building yourself for structural flaws before that building can evolve into something larger, and you can see the problem with this. There is a ''Macro'' tool that will do all of this for you, but it is expensive and money is a problem in this game. So, this element of the game sucks most of the fun out of the game.

Oh, but we're not done yet! We're not even to my Least Favorite Part of the game! Both Heaven and Hell require a workforce, naturally Angels and Demons. You can import them from the Powers that Be (which is quite expensive) or you can train your own from the people already in Heaven and Hell. However, if you train too many Angels, for example, the angels will get bored, and blast a hole in Hell. But that puts some Demons out of work, who now take potshots at Heaven, which puts more Angels out of work, and so on, until both Heaven and Hell are destroyed. So you must maintain an equilibrium of Trained Workers, and Imported workers, by carefully watching to make sure the % doesn't exceed safety levels. And you have to do this a lot, as you don't want to import workers, that's expensive, and money is a problem. So, in any given game, you'll be constantly checking not only each and every building in your Zones, but also your Worker Training Sites to keep maximum efficiency.

Which brings us finally to my big problem with the game, money. There just isn't enough of it. Ever. The only source of money in the game is incoming Souls, of which you get a small fee per soul. However, at the start of the game, when you could really use that money, you don't get anywhere near enough to be of any use to you. Furthermore, as your Afterlife's grow, expenses will spiral out of control, while your income graph steadily climbs upward. So, you end out losing more and more money as time goes on. Money wouldn't be so much of a problem if you didn't have to use the Macro Tool to balance all the zones constantly (unless you're insane and want to do every building by hand), or if you could keep your Workforce from blasting Hell if they got bored.

This game forces you to micromanage every little detail in the game to the tiniest level, because you can't get anywhere in this game unless you are running at constant peak efficiency, and that, my friend, just isn't all that much fun. It's annoying, and makes this more work than a game, and that isn't why I buy games!

I rated Afterlife a 3 because this game forgets that games are supposed to be fun, not work.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/09/00, Updated 04/09/00