A few years ago, Lionhead studios put out an intriguing game called Black and White. The game placed you in the shoes of a god to lord over your people. Black and White was based around two concepts: the choice between good and evil and the development of a huge titan. The game, unfortunately, was hit and miss, and relegated to more of a cult status than that of an actual success. The main problem was Black and White had zilch in the way of variety. You were tasked with convincing other people to abandon their god and come worship you, and you were out to teach how to make your titan light his waste materials on fire and chuck them at the enemy. The game was quite dull on a whole, but did bring up the interesting concept of gradual change based on character actions. If it were expanded on, the concept could really work well.
Black and White 2 sought to bring the concept to a more viable reality. With an expanded arsenal of buildings and an additional RTS element, B&W2 attempts to shore up all that was wrong with the original.
The gameplay is very much similar to the first game. The best part is the mouse movement structure is worlds better. The game involves manipulating the world with your ethereal hand. You use it to grab the land and move your vision around the world. The original game had numerous problems with this method, especially when it involved rotating the camera. In the original, you had to reach to the edge of the screen and grab it to spin around. The maneuver required a great deal of finesse and I frequently found myself panning instead of grabbing the edge. Furthermore, the land movement was choppy and difficult to handle. As a result, gamers were more likely to use the keyboard to move around the world, although that was still complicated, as it required multiple buttons to be used to do something as simple as turn around.
B&W2 made everything better. World movement still functions on a similar concept, but movement is fluid and easy to handle. Instead of grabbing the edge of the screen, you now just hold down the center mouse button and your hand does a pirouette and turns the camera. Zooming no longer involves holding down the left and right mouse buttons, but a simple twirl of the mouse wheel. In this game, I found that manipulating the world with the hand to be superior to trying to move around using the arrows on my keyboard.
The building portion of the game was also overhauled. In the original game, you were limited to building by using a frames idea. You built craftsmen to put together box frames that you then dropped on the world to create a building blueprint. This limited the gamer to a small home, large home, graveyard, nursery, and a wonder.
B&W2 moved on to a different method of building. While there are still blueprints used to construct, the game now centers around a menu system. Open the menu and pick the building, then you can place it in the world for your followers (or your own self) to build. This opens up a new variety of buildings ranging from torture chambers to theaters, and thus more ways to influence your people and your good/evil rating.
Black and White 2 still centers around controlling the entire map, but gives you additional options to do this. There is still the influence method. You can build a huge, wonderful city and convince people to pack up and move in. This is the good method. Then there is the evil method, which involves building armies and conquering.
Army building is simple. Build an armory, archery range, or siege engineer shop, and then select the flag sticking out the top of it. Then, pick and open piece of land, hold, and drag. As you drag away from the flag, you will notice the army size increasing. Once you have the desired size, release and available men in your settlement will join up.
All you have to do afterward is march them at the enemy. Unfortunately, as an RTS, Black and White 2 falls somewhere between the days before an RTS and Dune 2000. You have all of three units and all they do is rush in and attack. While your platoons do receive experience and level up, keeping that way is a cinch; when your army is depleted, all you have to do is pick up a few more and drop them in, all without diluting your skills. Furthermore, if you do lose a lot of men (20 or more), dropping people in gets a bit tedious, even with the multi pickup ability purchased.
Black and White 2 centers around a concept called tribute. In the first game, you had to influence your way back and forth across the map to beat the opposition, in Black and White 2, you have none of that. Instead, when you take over towns or perform certain tasks, you are given tribute. The tribute is then spent to buy new building blueprints, spells, or creature abilities.
The biggest issue with Black and White 2 is it is far too easy to succeed. Build a huge city, and people will flock to it. The opposition has little to no option of getting back what you took over through influence. The people packed up and left the settlement, so there is nothing left to conquer. Furthermore, you have nothing to worry about when it comes to losing your home city to a more influential enemy settlement. Just keep on building and the enemy’s followers will abandon him permanently.
The evil method, conquest, is just as easy. Build a huge army and use your creature as support, and you are mostly unstoppable.
Furthermore, the enemy isn’t exactly going to do a whole lot to try and stop you. The A.I. is atrociously bad. A good example is the second Japanese land. I put up a wall and then dropped 10 archers on it. The enemy’s response was to just send in melee troops and stand them at the edge of the wall. They would just stand there whilst my archers picked them off one by one, easily boosting their skills. They once sent in a catapult, but that was easily dispatched by a rock I tossed at them. They’ll sometimes throw out a wonder spell, but they tend to be badly placed and are not effective; the hurricane wonder that was used on me that got a whole of a single hut. Good job, guys.
The enemy creature is also fairly stupid. It follows along a set path and is easy to track. He also gets his butt whooped easily by my own creature. It is as if the enemy creature wants to get beat into a bloody pulp.
Even the creature interaction portion isn’t as interesting as the first game. Yes, managing the creature is much easier and instead of actually teaching it, you reward or punish a set number of behaviors that are pre-programmed. While you can control whether or not the creature pinches a loaf on a building or eats a person, you cannot teach them to do wild things like light his crap on fire and toss it into an enemy formation. You cannot teach him to hit a rock with a tree stump to bowl over some archers. Sure, you can see his stats easier and know his thoughts, but that isn’t nearly as fun or random as the first game. The creature also doesn’t get nearly as humongous as the previous game either. At most, he can look over a wall in the game whereas in the first, the maxed out titan could simply step over it. The creature is no longer very imposing.
Visually, Black and White 2 is stunning. The creature has gorgeous fur effects and you can zoom in and see ants crawling around in the realistic looking grass. Buildings mold and change based on your good or evil demeanor and spell effects are stunning. The people, though, don’t look all that much better than the previous game. They have a little bit more detail, but nowhere near to match the scope of the full game. It is understandable why, though, as when the population hits the 500 mark, the game begins to slow down considerably.
The game sounds are average. Voice acting is good, but your conscience devil and angel tend to get a bit irritating as they frequently interject their opinions at times when you just couldn’t care much. There isn’t much in the way of ambient music, but the music when firing off a wonder is good.
Black and White 2 also suffers from a poor replay value. While the most recent patch fixed having to deal with the opening tutorial every time you restarted, you still have to slog your way through a lot more tutorials before getting into the main game. The two worlds after the main tutorial island and opening assault on the Greeks are basically huge tutorial maps. It takes about two hours to get through them before getting into the meat of the game. Plus, once you’ve seen the land, you get a good idea of what to expect and can blow through it even faster than the first time through.
Black and White 2 turned out to be a lot like its predecessor in a lot of ways. Both started as grand ideas involving tons of open-ended gameplay. Both ended up failing to deliver. While B&W simply was dull and arduous, B&W2 ended up being far too easy to handle with little reason to go through again as the opposite alignment. Once again, a great idea failed to deliver when it really counted.
