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Black & White 2

Black and White 2 – Those wacky animal deities are back at it again for another round of Electronic Arts’ and Lionhead’s Black and White. The old moniker for the series, asking whether you’re a good god or an evil god, has been replaced with the question: Are you a god of Peace, or a god of War?” This essential question sums up the conflict between the two primary play styles that drive the game onward.

Let’s start at the beginning. You’re a god. This is sort of inherent to the notion of Black and White being a “God Game,” but it bears repeating. Apparently, you’re the personal deity of a troublesome knot of Greeks who, for some reason, have been scattered to the winds by an invading Aztec army. To escape the wrath of the temporally unlikely raiding party, one of those rambunctious Greeks calls to… someone, begging for a god. You are that god. And as a god called into action by a desperate tribe of besieged people, you come to the rescue in a dramatic fashion, doing what any god would do in your position.

You go pick out a puppy.

That’s right! Since this is a Black and White game, your primary concern will be the selection of an appropriate pet: the embodiment of you to your peoples: the noble and enormous avatar of your glory; the conquering beast to lead your armies, construct your vast cities, and poop on your most devout worshipers. At the start, you’ll select from four animals: a cow, lion, wolf, or monkey. That animal will be with you through thick and thin, growing as your people do, helping them along as they… oh, crap! That’s right! Our people are being destroyed by Aztecs! Hurry!

In the nick of time, you’ll pluck a few dozen shaken Greeks from the fire that once was their village and set them down in a new, promising land – one that, with a lot of hard work and a few miracles by yours truly, can build up the broken bones of your once great peoples into a thriving… Ack! Vikings! Why are there Vikings here? That doesn’t make any sense!

And so on. There aren’t a lot of civilizations in this island world which you inhabit that seem to much care for the Greeks, and you’ll find yourself under pretty much constant assault by the Norse or the Japanese or some other bunch of invaders. This survival storyline seems developed to quell the complaints of players who thought the first Black and White game was too open-ended and didn’t offer enough reason to progress from one island to another.

If anything, the new game forces much the opposite effect, driving a real and actual timeline by which you must evacuate and start your civilization over, which might annoy those gamers who’d prefer to linger and build their cities. As you progress through the game, you’ll gain access to new parts for that city, meaning that you hit a stopping point in its construction – where you’re no longer earning new parts for your metropolis by the things you do, but by what level you’re on. This can be frustrating for the “gods of peace,” because it ultimately means that you’ll have to part with the thing you’ve created, the carefully crafted city, because your people don’t know how to build universities on this island. The next island, however, is more fertile for education, and once we get those sundry foodstocks squared away – again – we can check out the pretty new architecture and… Argh! More Aztecs!

Why do we build? Because it’s one of the two ways of winning the game, that’s why! By constructing a beautiful, functional city; one that is aesthetically pleasing, we can impress our enemy into making a pilgrimage to our lands. As our white-bearded shoulder-angel reminds us, we can win hearts and mind through peace – just by meeting every little demand our people have. It turns out that those demands are numerous, as the people have very little interest in actually taking care of themselves, so you’re often left to micromanage the whims of every last citizen. Thankfully, those demands are displayed for you on your city’s central altar, be they food, housing, breeding, or (should you have taken a liking to smashing your whiny people with very large rocks) mercy. It’s quite a task, keeping the Greeks happy, but pays off when a neighboring village shows up at your gates, begging to live among you.

“But,” reminds your shoulder devil, “what’s the fun of that?” The other way to conquer the lands is to build vast armies and tear those villages apart, capturing them and slaughtering all the people so they won’t go begging to you for food. “Go on and be a god of war,” he says. You can build your cities into soldier-factories, focusing on fields of grain and housing to quarter your troops until the time is right to strike out at your foe. Your town won’t look as nice, but it will still outshine all those smoldering ruins that had the gall to be located nearby.

The acts of war are fun, and the game has got a good “RTS-lite” element to it. You can build up foot soldiers and archers and the like and send them charging over the lands like a plague of locusts, backed by the powerful claws of your monstrous monkey beast. Hundreds of troops can be sent into huge rampaging battles while your creature smashes alongside, crushing platoons underfoot (it doesn’t always care whose platoons, by the way). It’s awesome to watch, if you’re of the large army-building mindset. But you don’t have to get your hands bloody. Even if it’s only a defensive garrison, a few troops will do. The enemy never really becomes aggressive enough to charge your walls in large numbers.

No matter which path you choose, your animal avatar can play a part. They can help in the construction of buildings or gathering food for your populous, or they can siege enemy gates with spells you’ve taught to them. Their appearance changes with their personality under your direction. If you’re a mean individual, they’ll take on a darker look, all claws and fangs. If you let them hang out in your town, sucking up the grain from the storehouses, they’ll grow fat and happy.

You train your creature by reading their thoughts in little bubbles that appear over their head, and then stroking them lovingly to praise and encourage that thought, or slapping them across the face with a flick of the mouse to get them to put that peasant down. Bad cow! No eating worshipers! Stop flinging poo!

The creature training represents a major alteration to how the series worked before. You used to not know what your beast was thinking, but had to watch it closely and punish or encourage it as it performed tasks. Now, you can see what they’re thinking ahead of time and get to them before they cause any damage. If you really want to be a control freak and shape your creature’s life ahead of time, you can access all of their thoughts in a menu and set their opinions before they do anything at all, though that will decrease the Free Will rating of your animal to the point where they feel constrained and bitter. Personally, I found that the creatures’ actions were largely inconsequential and found no harm in letting them roam about, doing as they wished as I built up my cities, only attending to them when I got bored of building houses. Yes, they can be helpful in construction, but never to the point where I really felt dependent on them, and my people seemed largely indifferent to their presence.

City building is, at the same time, easy and tedious. Because you have to repeat the same basic tasks of getting up and running on every island, it can drone on and on, and the restrictions the topography places on your construction can be binding. As your cities expand, so too does your ring of influence, the area in which you are able to perform your godly feats, though that radius does not seem to grow very quickly, and you often have to build out some useless structures, like pillars along roadways, just to open up access to a new resource, such as an ore mine. It’s almost impossible to play a nation of entirely peaceful means, as the limited resource restrictions practically necessitate that you take over at least a couple of villages by force in order to gather the resources nearby and build up enough influence to draw out the settlers of the enemy capitol.

The game’s control is simple, and can be played entirely with the mouse, though a few keyboard shortcuts speed things up a bit. The peoples’ most wanted constructions appear on the town square altar and can be dragged to wherever you want them to be built. To quicken the pace on constructing a neighborhood, just drag one house to the side and you’ll have the foundation template for another. You construct roads by simply dragging a finger through the dirt, drawing your paths as you see fit. That last bit can be frustrating at times, because they don’t always go exactly where you want them to, and foot traffic is often directed by where the road lies. So if your people aren’t using their new amphitheatre, it might be because you haven’t drawn a road entirely up to its front door. As a cool little hint, however, you can watch for where your people have trod paths of their own and fill in the dirt paths with cobblestone.

Where the control is simple, the interface is complex. This is a difficult distinction to make, but I’ll give it a shot. If the control is figuring out how to do something, the interface is essential to understanding why and when something must be done. Black and White 2 contains a number of clues that point out when you’re behaving in a proper, godlike manner. The demands of your peasants at town square are one of them. The smiley faces that appear when placing buildings, directing you where to build to maximize happiness, is another. However, there is another nebulous category. It’s difficult to tell when you are being good or evil. Picking up and throwing one of your citizens over a mountain range produces an expected result, but on the whole it’s hard to maintain a level of good-ness, even when you think you’re giving the people what they want. It’s just hard to do right by them. That the game lacks any real tutorial for being a good god is partly to blame, as the shoulder angel doesn’t go into great detail, normally only appearing to scold you for setting the world record in the peasant-toss.

Another subtle clue comes in the form of the game’s pulse. There is a background heartbeat to the game, a calming sound effect that thrums slowly while all is going well but builds into war drums when a threat appears. It’s a decade-old trick of video games to get the player’s pulse racing when something immediate is going on, and it still works. However, in Black and White 2, the threat that sets the heartbeat racing can be completely unknown to the player and without the slightest hint. While I was playing this game, building my peaceful nation, the heartbeat raced at a frantic tempo, dragging my own along with it, and kept this pace for a full hour and a half before I had to shut the game off for fear of having a heart attack or a fit of general annoyance (which ever came first). As far as I could tell, my civilization was progressing normally, going about their daily tasks, yet here was Poe’s Telltale Heart, driving me to madness, making me want to drop the citizens, one by one, into a sacrificial altar until I eliminated whoever it was that was too excited to go on. I can’t use that saved game anymore.

Was it a bug in the game? Chances are. There are a number of glitches in Black and White 2, particularly in the sound department. The angel and demon that advise you shouted mercilessly at me, their volume cranked well above any background noise, threatening to blow out speakers and eardrums, and no measure of volume adjustment in the menus seemed to help. There is a fixed zoom distance away from your town at which the sounds of the marketplace suddenly blare at you, entirely silent a few feet further away. Some of the sub missions that earn you valuable Tribute points (triggered by clicking on scattered silver scrolls and invested in new buildings and powers) would start and stop abruptly, never fully executing their mini-games. Rather, the shoulder-demon would flop onto the screen, deliver half of its intended line, shrug, and vanish again with no effect. Patches exist to fix a number of the game’s problems, but be warned that those should be applied before playing, as doing so afterwards will invalidate your saved games and your hard-built cities.

So sound is a problem. How about the graphics? In short, they look great. As you can zoom out from your island into sub-orbital space, there is a softening effect, a sort of blur of distance. When you zoom in, you can check out the bugs crawling on city streets, the waving of wheat in the fields, the fur of your lion’s mane. You can also see the traditional blocky heads and bodies of your people as they mill about, complaining about you. On the whole, it looks very nice. The oceans are particularly gorgeous at sunset, and you can chose to watch that sunset again and again by clicking on the sky and dragging the sundial to the appropriate time.

Finally, the AI still has problems. It’s tough to get your creature or your people to do what you want, and they’ll often just go off and do their own thing one minute, then come crying to you when they need something. The game is so rife with micromanagement that it bleeds over into the realm of the cumbersome, undercutting the fun of building one civilization while tearing others down with frustration over a people’s inability to gather the resources they need to survive or breed when they think they need to.

Black and White 2 still suffers from some of the problems of the first. It is still too ambitious, too large of a concept for what it actually achieves. It promises the opportunity to be either a god of peace or a god of war, but falls short of presenting the actual framework to make this decision possible. In truth, you have to be both a god of peace and war to play the game fully. The delicate balance Lionhead Studios faces between creating an open-ended and a mission driven game must be a difficult one, and they still seem to be struggling to find that equilibrium. They tried a number of new approaches in this game to fix some of the problems of the first. It’s still too ambiguous – not in the “tell me what to do” sense, but more in the “I don’t understand what this means” way. This used to be something that God Games handled by the inclusion of thick tomes of instruction books, but even that is missing here. In short, there’s still much to be done on Black and White.

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Posted by Brad on Nov 15th, 2005 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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