"Full of good intentions, but not much else"

First Impressions:

In Afterlife, you take the role of a Demiurge, a godlike being delegated by the omnipotent Powers That Be to take charge of a world's afterlife. Though the planet in your charge resembles Earth in some ways, LucasArts errs on the side of political correctness by making it obvious that this is purely a fictitious world. This game is, however, a humorous satire of the generally accepted conventions of Paradise and Perdition crammed into a SimCity-like package. Right from the beginning cheesy introductory movie (labeled as such in the main menu itself), it is clear that Afterlife is hardly meant as a theological dissertation on life after death.

Gameplay: 3

As a demiurge, your job is to provide a place where the newly-deceased EMBOs (humanoid beings with big, buggy eyes) will spend eternity as SOULs (an acronym for ''Stuff of Unending Life''). You are permitted to do this in any manner you please, and may even omit Heaven or Hell if you so desire. Both will require you to employ unique planning tactics. For example, an ordered grid where one zoning block is right next to another will work fine in designing Heaven, but a well-designed Hell requires one type of zone to be far from the next, often resulting in branching roads with zones placed as close to the ends as possible. Various types of support buildings are also available if you have the cash or previously unlocked it by achieving certain milestones. Speaking of zones, just like in SimCity, all you need to do is place them properly and your angels or demons will build the Fate Structures used to house SOULs for you. Your assigned demonic and angelic advisors, Jasper Wormsworth and Aria Goodhalo, inform you of any weaknesses in your grand plans (in addition to engaging in witty repartee) and also star in a well-designed online tutorial for the game. This is par for the course in terms of writing quality, as nearly every building features a well-written and often funny description.

But even the stuff of the divine have their drawbacks. You have a limited amount of funds to spend on your barren Heaven and/or Hell, and even skilled players will lose much of that in their efforts to turn a profit. For that matter, turning any profit is easily the most difficult and frustrating part of the game. Expansion must be undertaken slowly in the very beginning, otherwise you risk wasting money. Concepts such as your workforce, staff housing, and planetary population must be managed carefully at all times, as well as the buildings for your SOULs. If your afterlife isn't at peak efficiency, it's probably not going to be profitable.

It is in the game's concept of efficiency where Afterlife begins to show major flaws in its design. The worst of these flaws is in its handling of the zoned Fate Structure buildings. SOULs either temporarily or permanently inhabit a building, depending on their beliefs while they were living. To make a building efficient, you must click on a building, access a display with a sliding bar, and balance it so that it perfectly represents the combined needs of the SOULs inside. In theory, one imagines that this was done deliberately so that a player would periodically make their buildings efficient by clicking each one and in the process look at the picture and description of each building, possibly eliciting a response somewhere along the lines of, ''Gee, isn't that neat?'' In practice, this penalizes experienced players who have seen all the descriptions and don't want to be bothered with clicking on each and every building. The result is that one needs to use the MacroManager, which is a cumbersome tool used to automatically balance large numbers of buildings. Unfortunately, the cost to use this tool becomes increasingly expensive as the game progresses, and eventually becomes prohibitively expensive and virtually useless late in the game.

The greatest problem with the game is that when the novelty of the humorous aspects of the game wears off, the result is a game that just isn't fun to play. Many details in the game must be directly and constantly monitored to keep your afterlife running smoothly. Such micro-management may be simple for a real Demiurge, but on behalf of the mortal gaming population, the constant need to continually oversee increasingly trivial details loses its appeal very quickly.

Visuals: 6

As with its counterparts of the day, Afterlife's visuals aren't spectacular but get the job done. The highlights are occasional bonus scenes found in a few of the building overviews, which are high-quality concept art depicting some part of the building. There isn't much animation to speak of as SOULs are mostly represented as dots on your roads, while buildings simply fade in and morph into other buildings. The structures in the game all are drawn with utilitarian efficiency; just enough to get the job done and look amusing from a distance without looking especially exciting. Be warned that it is in your best interest to play this in as high a resolution as your monitor will allow. Building pop-up menus will constantly get in the way at lower resolutions and make an already cumbersome game that much more cumbersome.

Audio: 7

The soundtrack consists of about twenty minutes of exceptionally well-produced and well-written music, of which only the music for some of the various disasters comes close to being obtrusive. That's a remarkable feat for such a short soundtrack. Those who prefer their music with Baroque, Beatles, and Indian influences are in for a treat. Sound effects mostly consist of button accents and appropriately-themed noises for when structures are built. The voice actors behind Jasper and Aria did an especially noteworthy job of bringing life to their characters.

Final Thoughts:

When you look at this game, it's obvious that a great deal of time and effort was put into it, especially in the myriad descriptions found throughout it. And yet this corresponding emphasis on micro-management is the game's greatest flaw. I can only recommend Afterlife solely for its humor, as the game itself will only appeal to the most diehard connoisseurs of detail. Truly an example of how the road to Gaming Hell is paved with good intentions.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/17/03, Updated 07/17/03