I never quite forgave those bastards for releasing the first B&W despite the fact that it just WOULDN’T work with many AMD processors. Nice way to blow $50…
Anyways, I’m nearly over it now, and it’s been a few new 'puters since then, and I’d sort of like to see if I really missed anything, is the new one any good?
Yes, there’s plenty of Good. And quite a lot of Evil as well. That’s kinda the point of the game.
Ha. I’m so funny.
Did you ever get to play B&W 1?
If you liked that a lot, you’ll enjoy B&W 2.
If you like RTS games, you might enjoy B&W 2. It is, however, extremely simplistic in its combat.
If you like simulation games like Sim City or Populous, you might enjoy B&W 2. One thing it does extremely right is city-building.
If you thought “Black and White Two? What’s that?” you might go here: http://www.lionhead.com/bw2/
If everybody at your family reunion kinda looks the same, you might be a redneck.
I got this game the day it was released. I plan to stop playing it sometime this weekend… by which I mean put it down and try something else, like sleeping or eating. I might even bathe.
I had (still have) the first one, and loved it. The concept was, and still is, so unique and open-ended that, even though it would ALWAYS crash before I could finish a game, I would keep playing it once in a while, just to try something else that I’d thought of.
And they kept a lot of that in the sequel. B&W 2 I mean… never bothered with Creature Isle.
The creature training system has been changed, in that you can now tell exactly what you’re rewarding or punishing and by how much. This is good because it lets you have some actual control over what you’re doing; no more accidentally rewarding eating villagers because you couldn’t get to the critter in time, or didn’t see him doing it. The downside is, as some have complained, the creature doesn’t feel nearly as real anymore. It’s much more robotic, more programmed, and you just don’t feel like it’s a real animal when you’re constantly searching through its mind for things to teach it.
There are fewer miracles it can learn, and fewer miracles you can do yourself. No more rains of lumber or mana from the heavens; your citizens have to do that all manually. There are some new ‘epic’ miracles, which are fun, and of course you still get to throw fireballs and lightning around. Frying an enemy’s army with lightning is a blast, and dropping a volcano right on the edge of the enemy’s city is a thing of beauty!
There are a LOT of new buildings available. A variety of houses from hovels to mansions, and even skyscrapers that you can reportedly stack 50 units high (that’s a LOT of housing). Several buildings to enhance or decrease happiness, such as statues and lamps or spikey pointy things and torture chambers, can be placed, and things like temples and universities also serve their purposes. More or less.
So if you’re looking for something amusing, something different, and something you can just mess around with and have fun, it’s a good game.
But the downside is that I’ve found it terribly unchallenging. The enemies… well… they’re dumb. Even for computer enemies they’re dumb. Tiny groups of soldiers marching in formation between two ranks of heavily fortified archers, over and over again, and they NEVER learn that this may, in fact, be a bad idea. This may be intentional, or it may be one of many bugs that still made it through to the release.
Release AND 100mb Patch, released two days after it hit the shelves. And it’s still buggy, or so I hear.
I have a fairly decent computer, three years old or so, not a lot of hardware in it. And it runs just fine, most of the time, now that I’ve updated my drivers. A bit of lag when the map gets full, but that’s not too bad. It’s certainly better than the first one ever was.
Oh, and aside from the remaining bugs (which honestly I haven’t seen many of), the main complaint about this is there is NO MULTIPLAYER. Yet.
No Skirmish maps either, although you can go back and replay previous maps with your new skills and your same creature, so that helps.
There are six good maps, one ok map with minimal combat, and one ‘land’ they claim you get to play, but it’s really part of the tutorial and all you do is click a couple times where they tell you to click.
Now, Lionhead says they’re currently working on patch 1.2. They also claim that they will be releasing other upgrades in the future, specifically promising that one day we will be able to play B&W2 in multiplayer. There’s also talk of adding a skirmish mode, and/or a map editor type program. I will believe these when I see them, and not a day before then.
All that being said, I’m happy with my purchase, and quite glad to see that it actually runs well. I expect to play with this one from time to time for many years, even if they never upgrade it again.
Lemme know what you think when/if you get it, maybe we can share tips and tricks.
Wow. Tell me who you work for, and what I need to say to make sure you get that raise…
Yes, I got to play B&W after a while. Guess I’m a silly, but I 'm gonna wait to see what folks have to say. Never ARGH again, ya know?
The head offices are a VERY long way from here, and I doubt your long-distance company offers such a connection. The expense account I access for my occasional article covers the majority of my needs, but if you have some extra cash laying around or maybe a sofa I could crash on for a couple nights…
I will be bringing my own towel.
Indeed it is. It won’t even run on my machine; it just throws up the splash screen then closes the program again.
So I don’t have an opinion of the gameplay. But it does look pretty in screenshots!
It’s OK. They fleshed out the city management and simplified the creature. No more teaching him stuff, just setting weights for predefined actions. But it’s nice they actually got around to putting in a game this time.
It’s also a hideous system hog. My 3Ghz processor, 1Gb Ram, 6800GT chugs liked hell on the forth map until I edited some graphics config files.
Doubt I’ll play through the maps a second time but it’ll keep me busy until Civ 4 comes out (end of this month 
).