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Fun,... when it would run!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: May 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

*First off, all the patches & driver updates they recommended, did not stop this game from crashing my PC (something nothing else has ever done) during every game session. I have the ATI card they desired & met the standards. There was no online support other than reading what was already written.

Yet this game was enjoyable enough for me to play it at every opportunity, rebooting as needed, until I completed it. Age of Empires 2 has been the only other PC game that has hooked me.

You will note, as you begin this game, that it has humor, and in some ways is targeted for a teenage audience. I think people of almost all ages can get a kick out of this unusual RPG game.

Have you heard of Populous? It was a Playstation game where you were a goddess, looking down & controlling your tribe; making sure towns were built and defended, and throwing out some magic of your own.

B & W2 reminds me of it, except here you also have a "creature", your own pet that you help raise & train through reward & punishment. I like that we are given a choice of 4 to choose from also.

There is enough freedom in this game to concentrate on fighting, or city-building, or both, whichever is your preference.

There are also little side-missions that are optional to complete, but give you more money to buy things. They are puzzles to figure out.

Each land has a level, and the game actually can go quickly, especially after the 3rd land. Your first enemies, and last, are the Aztecs, which taunt you in the background while you play. The 2nd are the Norse, and 3rd, the Japanese.

After you have completed all the levels, the game lets you start over on level 3 with the Norse, but now you have all the fancy buildings to impress them with and all the magic too. Your creature is full grown and battle hardened. This makes it almost too easy the 2nd time!

I have the Creature Expansion to this game on the way. I hope it will be written to be more compatable with my PC. ( 1.8 AMD XP w/2 HD's, & 1 gig ram)

This game is worth a try if you like city-building or RPG!

Fun, but not perfect

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: October 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First of all, just let me say that the graphics in Black & White 2 are beautiful; everything is rendered with breathtaking detail. (In fact, on my relatively new system, I had to update my graphics card drivers because there were these big black rectangles over various parts of the land. The update fortunately fixed this and other problems.) Second, let me say that graphics definitely do not make a game, and Black & White 2 is no exception.

I was a fan of the original Black & White, and bought BW2 the day it came out in stores. I took it home and played for a few hours, and, after getting past all of those irritating tutorials (which I think should have definitely included a "Skip" button), began to grow frustrated with the very monotonous gameplay. I'm playing Land 7 now, and haven't experienced any of the excitement of either a god game or a strategy game (BW2's promise was to be the best of both worlds). Even Black & White's system of winning people by Belief has been removed. Now you either have to make your town "Impressive" enough to make others want to live there, or send out armies to defeat those other towns. In theory, it sounds like fun, but in reality, it's quite dull. If you want to be a "god of peace", then every level, you have to build a whole bunch of impressive buildings so people will come to live in your town. If you want to be a "god of war", then you have to raise a large army and go capture the enemie's towns. The army part wouldn't be as bad if the worlds weren't so large and the gameplay was much (MUCH) faster.

Black & White 2 tries to be the master of two genres, but it fails miserably. If you want to play a god game, find Populous 3. If you want to play a strategy game, buy Age of Empires or something. Leave Black & White 2 alone.

What a waste

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: April 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game has the potential to be fun. Unlike others who say this is "dumbed down" from the first one, I thought the the original B&W spent too much time forcing the player to set up cities and play the game with limited resources. This does correct some of the imbalance and allows for a more direct way to conquer other cities (namely, armies).

The problem is this sequel was designed like an after-thought. It, quite simply, doesn't work. My specs exceed what is needed - however, the game (and this is from forums dedicated to it) was not designed to be compatible with Windows XP, let alone Windows XP 64 Pro (which is what I run).

The result is that every time the game gets interested it crashes. Not to a blue screen, not directly to windows, but instead freezes, takes forever to get to the Windows Error screen, and then forces you to restart and go through the entire intro again.

So, no matter how much fun and pretty the game may look, it's unplayable.

play it a few times before reviewing

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 16
Date: June 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

plz stop doing reviews over how bad it is with to few options, cuz it just simply isn't that way. Yo can fire flaming people with catapults and or let you creature throw a flaming guy in the middle of an army so the middle of the army willl be on fire. You just need to be creative. Think like what will happen if I teach my creature to pick up a army guy set him on fire and than throw in the middle of a thightly builded city. This game has many options, but you'll have to create these options.

This wasn't really a review but a comment on other reviews who are saying that is boring and dull etc. With this game you have to make it fun with your imagination.

Terrible

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 28
Date: October 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First off your creature selection is next to ZIP! There are only 5 choices in this game.In the first game there were 18. 0/5 Stars

Your influence is now determined by building outward on your influence ring. So rather then being nice to your people just start building. I usally build all way to the enemy city then threw fireballs at them. 0/5 Stars

Computer AI is terrible. Kill the first few waves with Fireballs then they quit attacking. You can usally just walk into their city and take it over. 0/5 Stars

Trides :( In the orginal game there were 8 tribes. Now there are only 4. The tribes have different look but they are really all the same. In first game every tribe had a different bonus unique to it.

Overall the game play is just bad. You are no longer even competing against other gods. Ends up being pretty boring. Only reason I'd give them 1 star is for the graphics. They are pretty good. This is just a bad bad game. I don't remember the last time a company took an awesome game and made it so horrible. Don't bother even buying this till it's on the $10 rack.

Good in many ways, even though some may not approve.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: October 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Although I'm only half way through the game(there are 8 islands), I think I can legitimately write an honest review. If you don't think that's sufficient, don't bother reading.

B&W1 had alot of problems. There were bugs, and there were problems. I loved the game, but people had logical complaints. Most of that stuff has been fixed, but it might not fit your preference.

When I get into the game, I love it. You now build a more intricate town, which is great. You can also create armies which is fun. Having huge battles can be awesome if you have multiple platoons. You can control as many platoons as you have men. Your village has a specific number of men, women, children, and elderly. You may lose alot of your men to war, but your town won't be hindered that much. The best battles are those where you have archers, catapults, and soldiers all killing each other. The game kinda screws you though because it practically forces you to use catapults. I wanted a good creature, and if you send him into battle to destroy enemy walls it will make him evil.

The creature is much easier to use. He now talks to you through chat. You can easily teach him to do stuff now. If you want him to poop in fields, he will. If you want him to gather grain, he will. This kinda sucks because it is much more simplistic. I started having him work out and it said he was evil for some reason. Now, I'm having a really hard time getting him to be good because he won't do alot of things I tell him. Also, he has so many evil tendencies, like killing innocent animals, that it is hard to compensate for everything and make him good. Still, you can have a lot of fun with your creature. Even though, to my knowledge, they can't learn miracles, your creature will occasionaly cast some that he must already know. Whenever he builds a home, he uses miracle wood. In this game, there aren't that many good powers. You will be using water and heal alot if you want to use miracles, but I haven't recieved miracle grain or miracle wood for some reason.

Building towns can be fun. There are a lot of interesting buildings that you must unlock. They expand your influence and make people want to come to your town. You can avoid war altogether and entice people to live in your city, but where is the fun in that? Also, your store house can only hold so much grain, wood, and ore. You will either have too much or not enough. I hate how there is a limit, because I wasted alot of wood and grain my first few hours.

People now don't complain as much. In the first B&W, you could never satisfy everyone. Now, people have logical complaints and address how concerned they are.

The graphics and sounds are top notch. Waving your hand over flowers will move them. There are interesting bump maps which make some textures seem curvacious. There are also really nice character models now for every town.

All in all, I like this game alot. If you do hate it, I don't know what to tell you. If you hated the first game or hate RTS games in general, do not get this. If you worry about replay value, the game is fairly long considering it takes a while to play each island. I am having more fun building and having battles now than I was creating miracle forests everywhere and foresting them myself. Now, I am building cities and taking over cities with huge armies. It's a good one.

Black @ White 2

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: January 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

My son is using a basic dell Deminsion computer to play this game With Windows Xp and has no problems at all. He was heavy into the original black and white game, and after this new purchase of this version he likes it alot! I am not a pc game player by any means, but according to his review with me and time spent playing it he is impressed !

Slow in the Beginning, but Picks Up Immensly ...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: November 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

All right, I'm quite sick of seeing people hate on this game. I am addicted to Black & White 2. As soon as you get past the whole tutorial business, it's a free-for-all.

There are a couple problems. First, this game will not run on any old machine. It better be fast and have a good video card that supports pixel shading. The sound is good.

After installation issues, you get to the game. When you first play the game, the tutorials are extremely helpful. I first played the game on a laptop, and as stupid as the camera rotating sounded, I actually needed to know how to change the view with my fingerpad-mouse laptop. Learning completely how to interact with the world without having to refer to a manual I think is really good. When you replay the game, the tutorials seem redundant, but does anyone remember that the tutorials give you tribute in order to buy advances to your civilization? Now when you're trying to aquire 1,000,000 tribute to get the volcano miracle, every little tribute counts. So bare through the tutorials again and quit whining.

If you are the type of person that likes simulations (Any of the Maxis sim games, any from the Civilization series, for example), this game is highly addictive. I personally don't enjoy gore and violence every five seconds and appreciate the building the civilization part. You truly do get to control how the game goes. Plus, after you win a land, you can stay there as long as you like and grow that metropolis until the entire island is covered in your houses and buildings. It's obviously not a casual gamer type of thing.

Beating the game is a challenge, as it should be, but at the same time it is intriguing and fun.

I just was sick of seeing people give it such bad reviews. Leave Black & White 2 alone! Just because you aren't competent enough to complete this game or need to shoot something every five seconds doesn't mean this game is bad.

I'm a God, your a God, everyone's a God

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: April 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

To everyone who played the original Black and White you will knotice many advances in how the creature learns in Black and White 2. Added features also include a ton of buildings that you can build, armies you can raise and miracles that you can cast. Also with the addon that starts right where you leave off in the main game it makes the whole story very enjoyable.

Innovative but flawed game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: January 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

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.

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