Black & White 2
Rating:  -
Black and White 2 (BW2) is a real-time strategy game with many interesting features, from a game developer's perspective: buildings are not constrained to grids and can be rotated to any angle, roads are not constrained to straight lines and can be curved, the computer AI seems to experiment and learn what works against you in particular, there are two general approaches for winning (conquering and impressing), and there's a giant creature who can help you building and fighting. The user interface is innovative too: you can smoothly zoom from seeing the entire island down to seeing a single person, you can "paint" a road on your land to build it, you can pick up most things (trees, people, rocks, ore, grain, etc.) and throw or drop them (laws of physics dictate what happens to them), there are progressive pop-up bubbles over the objects (also used in Lionhead's new game, The Movies), army and city shape are shown as curved shaded regions on the map, and the landscape changes to indicate how good or evil you are (flowers vs. scorched earth). There's a lot of impressive technology here. Unfortunately the gameplay seems to be designed around the technology instead of the other way around.
The creature in Black and White 1 (BW1) learned from you what to do. Teaching took too much time though, so in BW2, there's a set of predefined actions that the creature can learn. The creature has been more helpful to me in this game than in BW1. I found that the creature overpowers most enemy armies, and I didn't need to use armies as much.
I found the city building aspect the most fun part of the game. Cities that are not built on grids are common in many countries but you don't see them often in computer games. It's fun to watch your little people go around and do their jobs. They're not very smart though; they'll keep complaining they need food, but they won't go to the farm and harvest crops. A cool bit of technology here is the (non-rectangular) shape on the ground showing the area you control. An annoyance is that it's hard to position the mouse just right to pick up certain objects, and it's hard to tell what's going to happen when you drop them. When planting trees for example, sometimes it would plant the tree with a circle of stones around it, sometimes it would just put it in the ground, sometimes it would fall to the ground, and sometimes it would get chopped up into lumber. There should be a preview of the action that's about to occur.
I followed the "good" path of winning by impressiveness, which meant I needed to build large cities that convinced the enemy's people to join my side. Unfortunately this sometimes involves building pointless buildings just to get lots of impressiveness points.
The quests are mostly stupid. You have to throw some rocks just right or solve some puzzle and you get points, which you can use to buy new powers or building types. You have to do some of them, because you need the points, but mostly they seem to be there to show off technology (the physics, the ability to change time, the ability to interact with objects, etc.) and do not add to the gameplay.
The battles are simple. I am likely in the minority in that I prefer this. There are only three unit types (plus the creature), and no formations or other advanced tactics. You just drag your army over to where you want it to attack, and it goes. A cool bit of technology here is the (non-rectangular) blob on the ground indicating where the army is. I was impressed by the computer AI experimenting with tactics against me. It had repeatedly attacked my city, failing nearly 40 times, but it had been trying different approaches each time. Sometimes it sent in archers first, sometimes the creature first, sometimes groups of archers and swordsmen, etc. Eventually it found a tactic that worked well: the archers and swordsmen stay back while the creature breaks down the wall, and then the archers and swordsmen stream into the city and cause havoc. Once it found a tactic that worked, it kept using it to great success. I had to work frantically to find a way to defend against that attack.
The performance of this game is mixed. Sometimes it's fast and sometimes it's slow. The recommended memory (512 MB) is not enough. In Windows Task Manager, I saw the game taking up 707 MB. You really need 1 GB of RAM to play. If your game is running too slowly, go into "Program Files\Black & White 2\Data\Graphics.INI" and find your video card and change the numbers. Read the top of the file to see what they mean; lower numbers aren't always faster. I have an ATI X800 and an Athlon 3500 and I had to lower the settings to nearly the minimum before the game would run at a decent speed.
There's not a lot of replay value here. You might play through once or twice, but the maps are the same each time and there aren't that many strategies to follow. By the second time you play through, you will be quite annoyed with the quests.
Overall, I am glad I got the game, because it's interesting. It's just not that much fun. It feels like a game developer's very cool research project. I hope Lionhead uses the technology they developed here to build some other games. If you want to see something different from your usual RTS game, I would recommend trying this out. However if your main goal is to find a really fun RTS game, I would recommend not getting it.
Rating:  -
Alright, I never played the first Black and White, though I hear it was amazing. I never finished this one, though I did get to the 4th island, I lost interest after that.
it gets repetative, and doesn't stray much from your typical RTS. I found my creature rather annoying, until I figuered out he can really only do one thing very well. if you train him to be a gatherer, and only that, and train him to eat and sleep and such, he will do it and take care of himself, however if you also tell him to entertain the people and fight, well at least in my case, he over worked himself and was constantly exhausted until I would force him to sleep.
It was fun for a while but island after island had very little new content. I found unlocking things to be quite difficult. If you like RTS's ALOT, perhaps are a big fan of the Civilazation series or the Age of Titans game, then you might enjoy this, but I dont recomend it otherwise. it was alright while it lasted, but it just took too long to get anywhere exciting, if it goes anywhere exciting at all.
The graphics are pretty unimpressive for a game of is stature, it took so long for them to release this, you would think it would be stunning. the new Age of Empires is beautiful, this leaves alot to be desired, some of the graphics are down right pixilated and pointy where they shouldn't be at all. The game looks older then it is, it's disapointing.
Ofcourse you can decide whether to be benevolent or evil, I went with being good, it was easy to win if I just concentrated on building a very good city. I tried being more evil on another character, I also found that pretty easy. Its a huge time sucker.
the impressive thing about it is how many people there are on the screen. there are alot of people on the screen at one time allowing for huge battles, but, that didn't really make up for the other short comings for me, personally. It could have been much better I feel.
Rating: -
I bought this game the day it came it while I was waiting for City of Villains. I was expecting it to be really awesome. Yes the graphics are more intense but that's mainly it. There's tons of bugs not even the patch fixes all of it. The AI will taunt you with the same lines until you conquer him or win him over. In the last mission my influence ring would not expand beyond my walls so I was stuck without soldiers, barely any walls, and barely able to survive the first waves. I eventually gave up and uninstalled the game.
Rating:  -
Check the system requirements before you buy this game. (What ever happend to listing them on the page where the game is sold?)
B&W2 does not run on my Dell, which is only three years old. I have XP, a P4 2.0 GHz, and a 64 MB GeForce video card (but the card does not support pixel shading!)
EA says the minimum system configuration for installing and running the game are:
"Windows XP or 2000 operating systems.
1.6 GHz or faster processor.
512 MB or more RAM.
3.5 GB or more free hard disk space.
Supported DirectX 8 or higher based 64 MB video card which supports pixel shading.
Supported Video Card Chipsets (these cards are tested to work with the game under normal setup with the most recent manufacturer drivers):
ATI Radeon 8500, 9100, 9200, 9250, 9500, 9550, 9600, 9700, 9800, X300, X600, X700, X800, and X850.
NVIDIA GeForce 6200, 6600, 6800, FX 5200, FX 5500, FX 5600, FX 5700, FX 5800, FX 5900, FX 5950, PCX 5900, Ti 4200, Ti 4600, and Ti 4800."
You will have to spend some time finding the requirements on the EA website. (Why make it easy for consumers to know what they are buying? They might not buy something that won't work!)
Rating:  -
I've been wanting this game ever since Creature Isle came out a few years ago. Now that I've got it, I love it. It has all the great aspects of the first game, and it imporves on all its flaws. There are so many features in the game, I can't explain them all. The graphics are superb, but if your computer can't handle them, you can always tune them down. The creature is back and better than ever. The only complaints I have with this game is the lack of creatures to choose from, and no multiplayer. The former is not much of a problem, as we will always get expansions with more creatures, and the latter is coming later. One complaint I've heard from other players is how the game isn't too good, because it's military system is too simple. But the thing is, it's not a strategy game. Sure, there are RTS elements in it, but the game in no way revolves around it. So final word, this game is very nice!
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