Black & White 2

Nothing is ever Black & White, Sam discovers...

The interface has also undergone radical changes in so much as there is one now. While it was brave to try for such a minimalist approach, B&W 1 was very poor on providing feedback to the player as well as being a bitch to control. Limiting all control to the hand of god was a courageous concept yet it wasn't well enough implemented so as not to cause more problems then it solved. Now there are seven pop-up panels each of which typically has another half-dozen sub. It's so much easier to control every aspect of your domain now and by holding your hand over a building or person a series of balloons will pop up with all the information needed to gauge your people's happiness and desires. Quite what you need to do to satisfy those desires manages to remain elusive. Keeping them fed and in resources is easy enough, but as an example, figuring out why they aren't breeding even when you have tons of fertility statues, nurseries and people assigned to do nothing else but shag the opposite sex is depressingly down to trial and error. For all the improvements in the interface the screen is now a lot more cluttered which unfortunately dispels some of the earlier immersion. To be honest it's a trade-off I'm willing to accept, but the game still cries out for a mayor or similar who can directly inform you of what needs to be done rather than leaving the player to work it out by decoding a series of coloured icons.

An even more acute problem occurs when you realise that if you have taken the path of peace all you will ever be doing is playing a simplified, albeit far prettier version of Sim-City, while if you want to be evil you'll be stuck playing the most basic RTS committed to a DVD. I got bored playing the game. It was diverting enough and by golly does it look amazing, but I still felt like there was little point to my involvement. Once the novelty has worn off (and if you played the first one it wears off far too quickly) you are left with a series of simplistic tasks and goals. If you want to build the most impressive structures you are going to have to complete every goal in every level which involves enduring unnecessary tedium. Quite who thought players would enjoy ripping out every single tree from an island needs to be kept on a tighter leash.

I also had a number of technical issues with the game. Every time I exited the game it would invariably bring up an error box and crash out. I had the game crash randomly after my first seven hours of play, which wasn't so bad until I discovered that Lionhead had neglected to include an auto-save, even in the 110MB patch that was tossed out the door mere moments after the game hit retail shelves. Not even when you complete an island does the game record your progress. I had to check the calendar just to confirm this was 2005. And if my memory doesn't lie to me, I recall being able to replay completed islands in the first version. Unbelievable.

To give it its due, the game has an incredible engine which demands the most out of any system it's played on. I could quite happily state that with everything turned on this is the most visually attractive game I've yet had the pleasure to play. Watching the red light of a new day creep along the battlements of your city wall or the shadows cast by mountains over your hamlet by the rolling sun a sense of tranquillity envelops the player. Leering at a hillside as it is enveloped in flames or at the lava pouring down the sides of a volcano into the streets of an enemy's town fills the player with an understanding of the intrinsic beauty of destruction. Unfortunately all this splendour soon has to be sacrificed for performance as your entire world slows down to a treacly crawl. Once the hand pointer starts weaving around the screen like a smacked-out ned it's time to saunter off to the options screen, make a cup of tea while this loads in, and then turn down some of the settings. To be fair, playing B&W 2 also really made me want to upgrade my graphics card to a new 300 note affair so that I could enjoy the spectacle and the endgame affects the way they were meant to be enjoyed. I will definitely be reinstalling this game to marvel at the world when I next take the upgrade plunge. It's a shame that B&W 2 is unable to disprove the age-old maxim that beauty is only skin deep.

I want to end this review with a comment pinched from the official B&W 2 message boards. Since B&W manages to be both an undeniable improvement over number one while continuing to be plagued by a series of gameplay, technical and design issues, the juxtaposition between the hype for the game and the reality of the shrink-wrapped DVD case cannot be ignored. I think that is what this poster had in mind:

If the last three times I went to McDonalds and paid for a Double Quarter pounder with cheese meal, and ended up with a hamburger, fries, a pop. I'd just stop going.

Let's hope The Movies turns out to be a Double Quarter pounder with cheese meal. Black & White 2, while enjoyable for a while, just isn't full of enough gaming nutrients to make it taste as appealing as it looks in the picture over the counter.

69%

By Sam Gibson