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Great God Game with Bits of Creatures, AoE

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 156 / 169
Date: October 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I'm a huge fan of Fable, Populous and Black & White. I got Black & White 2 the moment it came out, and dove into playing it. Was it worth the long wait?

First, make sure you download the 100mb patch before you start playing. Any save games you make will be incompatible with the patch, and the patch fixes a TON of bugs. It sort of makes you wonder about the QC process, if this was released on the same day as the software was. But in any case, at least they fixed the problems quickly.

The game is classic good-bad choices from Peter Molyneux - the creator of fantastic open ended games where you can choose your own destiny. In B&WII this is very much a combination of Creatures and Age of Empires. You are building up your town - placing buildings to please the villagers, tending farms, mining ore. You are also training your creature to be responsible - watering the gardens, entertaining the villagers. That being said you can instead choose to be an evil overlord - starving your villagers, taking over nearby towns, causing destruction.

The first B&W really went overboard on the creature micro-management. You were more of a creature nanny than a God. Some people might have enjoyed that - and there are certainly enough NintenDogs and NeoPet games out there to soothe those people who want to spent 24 hrs a day raising a pet. I really found it quite tedious to sit there slapping and petting an animal, when I was a god with a civilization to build. I'm thrilled that they have the whole creature thing much more reasonable. It still takes your attention to set the creature on its path, but you don't have to spend hours on it. You're a God after all.

By the same token, if you're looking for a high end killer war - strategy game, this just isn't it. This isn't meant to be like a Command & Conquer or other war engine. War is an aspect of the game, yes, but you are encouraged to bring in people by impressing them just as much as by conquering them.

The graphics are of course stellar. There are tons of villagers, each with his or her own name, personality and job, wandering around the village doing tasks. Each tree and flower can be interacted with individually. The sounds are reasonable, with a nice soundtrack that isn't hard to listen to repeatedly as you go through the game using different creatures and aiming for different alignments.

The shining essence of this game is of course the choices you make. As you make evil creatures, the world gets more and more grim through each level - and your creature begins to look really violent and depraved. If you choose to make good creatures, the world reacts to that quite amazingly, and your creature reflects those choices. Even the ground on which he / she walks reflects that nature.

In the end, you could probably play through the game in 1-2 days, on a single pass. But the fun in the game is to replay it with different creatures and different aims, to see how it affects your world. In this sense it's very much like Fable, a game that was amazingly fun to replay. I found this an extremely well balanced game between the town building, creature taming and god-like powers. Enjoy!

Dumbed down, a step backwards and many bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 106 / 136
Date: October 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First of all you'll need a video card that supports pixel shader 2.0 or higher or you won't see many of the eye popping graphics featured in the screenshots, such as water, weather, your "good" alignment effects, sun and moon, ants, the list goes on.
That being said, thats all this game really is - eye candy.
It only resembles the 1st game on the surface. Once you get into it you find out that its been "dumbed" down - ALOT.
The first map will have a tutorial on how to move your mouse left. Then it will teach you how to move your mouse right. Then Up. Then down. And thats just getting started on moving the mouse. You'll spend parts of the following 2 maps on tutorials as well that you can't bypass.
As for gameplay, the creature has lost all personality. Its now more robotic in nature as your training involves petting (or slapping) it to move a slider bar which determines to what degree it will or wont do something. Its basically "set it and forget it" You cannot teach it miracles anymore. You simply purchase them. You cannot control it in fights with other creatures like the first game. They duke it out on their own while you just watch.
The entire belief system is gone and your influence ring is now determined by your most outer edge buildings.
You either spend all your time building cities to impress nearby towns to join you or building an army to take them over by force.
Neither method is challenging and gets boring very quickly. There are only 3 unit types for armies and they are limited to move, attack, defend, get on walls, and disband. There was some strategy in the first game but you wont find it here. The enemy AI is horrible. It simply sends out wave after wave of platoons to your city walls whether it had the resources for them or not. It will also ignore you when you attack their towns unless you get close enough to the actual platoon itself. The enemy will also constantly taunt you endlessly. Many of the features that were promised didn't make it into the game and there is no multiplayer. I waited for this game for 4 years and its a huge disappointment and a step backwards. Unless you enjoy a game for its graphical presentation well over its gameplay, length, and replay value, save your money and avoid this title.

Get the online patch

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 33 / 36
Date: October 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

A quick tip. Get the online patch and install it BEFORE you start playing the game. The reason is that the patch (which fixes several bugs and is HUGE at nearly 100MB) breaks old saved games. So any game that you were playing before you installed the patch will not be able to load.

So get the patch, fix your installation, and THEN play the game.

B&W2 - What you should know before you buy

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 28 / 29
Date: October 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

For those that have played the original B&W, and who remember all that frustrating micromanaging, will certainly applaud Lionhead for finally working all that out. For some the new question is "What took you so long?" But for this review the question is "What new problems are there now?"

Newcomers will certainly be awed by the look and feel of this game, and will certainly enjoy watching their creature (I enjoy the cow myself ^^) grow and learn into their ideal beast. Even the old folks can't deny how awesome these creatures look, and are probably just as relieved to see how much more control they have on what their creature will do. But experienced gamers know that good games aren't all "just looks".

In my opinion: I love it. Graphically the game is 98% what I expected. One of my few issues with the graphics is that the people don't have functional facial features (since I don't know what the technical description is, I'm just peeved that nothing on their face actual moves... no talking, blinking... kind of lower standard as to what I was expecting, but allowable). The music is great; if I could I'd put it all on a CD and listen to it all the time. Thankfully, they aren't repeating the same story line (from what I've seen, I'm only 60% through the game) over again from the old one. Of course, you control everything through your hand and have that nifty toolbar to help you out when you need something done. Beats having to go all over the map to find out how many disciples you have how many resources you have stocked, what's going on where... you get the picture. If all these are what made a great game, I'd be tempted to give it 5 out of 5 stars.

Now, here's what you NEED TO KNOW before you commit to buying this game! First off, you will need a shy bit of a high end computer (or a little bit). Certainly might want to think about investing more ram (I'm going to aim for two 512 chips myself) before you get this game. It really sucks when the loading times take forever due to limited ram or slow processor. Speaking of which, you may, depending on what you are willing to spend, want to see about getting a new processor! There can be a heck of a lot going on your screen at once, so never hurts to see if you got the processing power (and then some) to handle it! Of course a good graphics card is most likely a BIG must, but that kind of goes without saying. The space is 3 gigs and a half I think, so just keep that in mind. All that said that's what you should know about the technical stuff. My computer is due for both more ram and probably a new processor, but right now the game runs fine with the exception of the choppy cut scenes (bummer I know, but I blame either the ram or the processor, because the game runs just great when I'm just playing).

Now, a little more about the game. FROM what I see, the creature's size does not grow to be any where near as big as in the original game, cause then I'd think the creature would just hop over the walls and have the run of the town. I suppose they did that so it wouldn't be TOO easy for the creature to destroy the platoons, or the buildings for that matter. After all, gotta give those little people a fighting chance, right? Your alignment, as before is another feature that makes this game so darned purdy. As it changes, the land that's under your influence, or anywhere your hand TOUCHES, is affected and changes accordingly. Example: Evil makes everything look so horribly depressing and ruined, and good is all flowers and bright colors. I'd have to say that that they did a good job rendering all that!

Now your creature is a little different. You can make him good or evil based on his actions, and of course he will change in appearance. However, he will undergo some minor changes at each no land. Example: My ape was 100% evil by the Norse land (second or third), and he really just looked more like a thug. Now I'm on the 5th or 6th area and he's starting to turn black and his hair is falling out in places, as well as his entire look just getting MEANER. Of course your creature will grow in size, and at your discretion get buffer and/or fatter, and so on and so forth, so you do have a LOT of control over his appearance than just if he's a good or bad little monster. Oh, another nifty thing that I just LOVE. As your creature moves around the areas that he walked on (touched?) ALSO changes to reflect his alignment. Now that's a good touch and kudos to the folks who kept an eye on appearance of this game.

Let's talk about your cities now. This is in nature a strategy game, but it is a different kind of strategy than what we're all used to. Even for those who have played the original B&W may find this remodeled system to be intriguing. You have many choices on how you can rule, but to sum them up the game explains them as being either good, bad, or neutral (for the record, neutral just means nothing really changes but your not slave to any decisions.) To be good you are NOT aloud to take over ANY towns (don't mean you can't from time to time.) To be evil you are NOT aloud to do anything that one could define as "NICE" (don't mean you won't if it benefits YOU). Your city will either be a large spread out town full of flowers, which is the general strategy for the good choice. Or it will be buildings atop buildings and people crammed into less than humane living conditions (heck you'll probably kill a few to feed your creature or sacrifice one to cast meteor on an invading platoon outside your walls). My point is that you do have a choice, and you are ALOUD to change your mind. One island you might be focusing completely on being evil, and then you just might have a change of heart at some point and then start aiming to be good. The transition will take a while to change and you won't see the changes right away, but that just depends how long you plan to be playing.

All this is a plus, but what comes next may disappoint a few... The War system. Okay, I say the pretty screen shots while anxiously waiting for it to come out, and I woulda thought without a doubt that your creature was more than just a "siege weapon" for the army. I thought he'd actually give ORDERS or something, ya know, be your GENERAL. Maybe I've not played it far enough, but this was a bit of a disappointment. I STILL don't know what the purpose of him "Inspiring the Troops" or what ever it's called is, but hey it kinda looks nifty! Oh, and when fighting the little platoons, the creature can be really stupid. He could kick into thin air because his foot was a shy bit too high, or he could hop around and NEVER hit one unit that didn't give chase to it, BUT the game does stress upgrading his roles so maybe he just isn't "leveled enough".

Stupid AI in my opinion...

Here's another downer. You don't fight the creature vs. creature fights anymore. He does it all himself based on soldier level, muscle, fatness, fitness, etc. This is cool to watch, and makes sense as to why you don't do it cause you have a bunch of platoons to be looking after, BUT still it would be nice to be able to tell it where to strike and when to block. Ya know, that all would be cool to control, BUT I'm not complaining as long as I always win >:D. For the record, don't think making platoons is a waste of time. Some of the enemy's platoons could kill your creature in seconds without some good back up. So if you designed your creature to be a war machine, support him with archers. That OR make a big platoon of footmen and use them as your main front instead.

The last thing, and my least favorite thing, is how the tribute system works. You know those big epic miracles that game was boasting? Ya know the volcanoes, or the siren? Will, you need to buy the buildings that make that using "tribute", Which is god money really, WHICH is only earned when you've hit some sort of mile stone or completed one of your objectives (like quests). Now, that's all fine and dandy, but while saving up that 400k for the first epic (the siren) you are passing up new buildings you can build, miracles you could use, and upgrades for your creature and town. But now I've gotten to the point where you get a LOT of tribute for doing things, but the problem is that it takes forEVER to get enough. Oh, and if you wanna make volcanoes, you need to buy the 1mil building (which are called wonders for the record) to be able to do that. Hey, if the game had any real fault, I'd say that would be it.

All right. The last points that I have to make. I said you would get the most out of the game TRIBUTE CONCERNED by going neutral because you'll be able to complete both the town and the army missions without being biased to any alignment. What you are missing is mostly appearance and style, and you then are simply playing the game to get through it. However, that's only if you are just doing ANYTHING without care of what alignment you are. You can do all the alignments with style, you just gotta find out what works best for you. Another point is that the tutorials are good enough to help you along, so make sure you pay your consciences good attention (no matter how gross that evil one is, sometimes he has got a point). Some glitches are mostly concerned with the creature, though I blame laggy ram for that.

If you haven't preordered it yet or what not, or put any money on it at all, get your facts straight cause you don't want to go through a total computer makeover to just run a game that you're gonna wanna take back tomorrow. That said, this game I wanna give 4.5 stars for, but because I've not completed it yet it's getting 4 stars to be on the safe side. I'm glad I got my copy of it, and wouldn't trade it for the world. Lets just hope that any "expansion packs" they add to this game can fix a few problems and present some new options.

Check The System Requirements Before Buying!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 33 / 45
Date: November 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

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!)

As good as the original, better in some ways

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 13
Date: October 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Black and White 2 isn't the same game B&W was, and in many good ways. First piece of advice if you loved the original; pay attention to the tutorial on "how to move." They've changed some of the navigational details.

The toolbar is a welcome addition, letting you find what you need quickly--use it--and the ability to accumulate "Tribute" and redeem it for various new buildings and tools feels familiar to players of other strategy games.

B&W2 does more of a job of incorporating the elements of a strategy game with an RPG, and if you like battles you'll get that here in a way the original did not satisfy.

The graphics are beautiful, the devil and angel either annoying or cute, depending on how you felt about them before, and the citizens fun to manipulate and help you feel godlike. City-building is more interesting with roads and rewards for doing it well.

Not a Strategy Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 18
Date: November 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

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!

Black and White 2

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: February 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is very similar to BW1 with some added features. If you liked BW1, you will like BW2.

You can build walls and pick up multiple people now. There are many more buildings you can build. You can build them yourself, without having to rely on your people.

The demon and the angel are back. They are the highlight of this game to me.

The visuals are improved and the popping of terrain as you zoom in and out has been significantly reduced.

The villagers are somewhat smarter, they will find work, rather than just sit and wait for something to do.

For me, the game moves too slowly and I was always running out of ore. Once you have no more ore, you hear "We need more ore", over and over and over again. Of course you can't expand easily without more ore. This is one of my biggest issues with this game. You need a resource, but can't get it. The villigers aren't smart enough to go search for it, and it gets frustrating trying to expand.

Building walls is similarly frustrating. It is hard to connect them together and hard to determine if someone can get around them. I built a wall up to a mountain and the enemy happily went right around it :(

For some reason you can build walls outside your influence area, but not roads. You get more influence by having your buildings connected to roads. To get that, I would up building a small stretch of road to the edge of my influence(which does not expand your influence), build a structure on the road (which does expand your influence), wait for the building to be built, then added another section of road. This creeping expansion takes way too long and is not all that interesting.

You have to breed villigers to make an army. That makes sense to me. The problem somes when your army is lost in a battle, you have to breed your villigers and wait for them to grow up and become of age. This get back to my point about the game being to slow for me.

The level of detail is amazing. You can see bugs on the ground and zoom out to 10,000 feet to see the whole island. Lionhead is to be commended for that.

I did find the blantant marketing annoying. There is an awful blurb in the instruction manual that is so out of place, I am disappointed with Lionhead. You cannot hit escape to avoid the intro marketing scenes which seem to go on forever. While I understand the marketing tie in with other companies, *please* let me escape over them after you display them. At the very least the 10th time I have started the game.

As for bugs, the game locks up for me sometimes after I exit a level and I have to reboot. If I manage to get back to the OS, the reolution has been changed to what the game resolution was set to.

Another slight disapointment from Lion's Head Studios.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: December 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

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.

hmmmmm....

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 15
Date: October 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Well, after the long wait it's finally here. Was the wait worth it, well kind of. It looks really nice, but to be honest I think it could still look better, but the atmosphere is still wonderful to immerse yourself in. Looks like they've pretty much copied the opening sequence of the original B&W to this one, which doesnt make it look like a step forward, especially given the time passed since then.

Its hard to write this review to be honest, as I really want to like the game, and am playing it a lot, but there are just little things annoying me, and these all add up to a lesser gaming experience. I find the 'hand' control system now to be cumbersome, when trying to lay out a road when the town is busy usually means picking a person up by accident, unless you zoom right in to do it, meaning you cant see exactly where you want to go, and speaking of zooming etc, I find the veiw point always seems to end up in a near vertical aspect. I have pretty much ignored the creature as he seems good at everything bar the odd miracle, and really doesnt give or take anything from my running of the land, bar in the odd army conflict. To be honest I now want to play the game as a town planning game, seeing how good a town/city I can build, because I dont feel any pull to follow any story. I have built walls to stop the enemy, they havent tried to breach them yet, and I cant be bothered taking towns.

I will play it to the end nonetheless, as it is nice on the eye, but I dont play this with a look of awe etched onto my face. Since the first game, we have had 'Far Cry' which is outstandingly good to look at, and set a benchmark for quality of graphics. I think they should use B&W's graphics engine, add a Shaman perhaps, boats, add some more islands, and take the Populous series forward, allowing the changing of landscape etc, it would look awesome (obviously) and I think you would get more out of this beauty by being nearer to it, more involed in the shaping of it, whilst also growing a race to take out another. I thought Populous the Beginning (if anyone remembers it) was amazing at the time, and more could have been taken from it, to be honest the soundtrack to that game was so nice I would keep it!!

Anyway enough unclear ramblings, the specs of my machine are, AMD 64 3000, Windows xp 64bit, geforce fx5900, 1gb ram. It runs sweatly, no glitches, no lag. if anyone outthere is debating windows xp64, it is rubbish if you want to run an appplication based pc, as I still havent found printer drivers for it, cant connect my sony digi cam to it etc. But as a games system it is perfect, I have set my pc up dual boot, a drive for win xp32, another for 64, I run apps only on 32, and games only on 64, the difference say in running halflife 2 on 32, and then running it on 64 was that I could set the quality of the game to max once I installed it on 64, and my graphics card is getting on a bit now!!

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