Black and White can be considered in two ways. The first (and most commonly-considered approach) to the game is that it was effectively overhyped, under-developed, and set on a flawed basis for practical gameplay. The second, less-appreciated train of thought is that the game was instead a brilliant, incredibly original offering for a then-stagnant gaming industry (though when has the industry not been stagnant?) that while problematic, offered some fantastic gameplay potential. Of course, this ultimately does not deny the fact that the game turned out to be something of a failure; in the face of massive hype, the bugs and gameplay issues that presented themselves were simply unacceptable. Lionhead has now set forth to resolve everyone’s concerns over the original game with a beefed-up sequel, With this much development time, one would expect that the common complaints and release a superb title, right?

Right. And in a perfect world, we’d also be playing Freespace 3, and Steel Battalion: Line of Contact would’ve been supported properly post-release. Sadly, this is hardly a perfect world, and Black and White 2 is not nearly the great hit we were all expecting. If anything, it seems as if the development team turned and did a one-eighty, trying too hard to fix things that weren’t really broken to begin with, while failing to address the game’s other concerns, or even making them worse. To this end, a patch was even released barely a day after the game had hit shelves, fixing numerous problems and adding the ability to skip the opening tutorials – given the demand over this feature however, I don’t understand why this wasn’t simply included in the shipped version. Regardless, let’s touch on the game’s good sides first, given how my initial approach was from that of surprising optimism.

Black and White 2 starts off on quite the promising foot. After first signing into the game, I was presented with a rather pleasing and nifty opening splash screen, which turned out to actually be interactive. After spending far longer than any sane person really should have fiddling with the nifty beaker and scooping stray pixels into it, I finally continued past so I could be subject to a rapid-fire barrage of other marketing slogans (fortunately, I was never asked to "Challenge Everything" – EA Games must be catching on) before being dumped into the main menu. A brief foray into the options screen later, and I was on my way to starting a new game.

Despite the intro being somewhat… unspectacular (a divine cry for help goes out with the desire for a new god to lead a civilization to salvation, or somesuch, in a manner disturbingly similar to that of the original game), the starting minutes of the game left me very impressed. What was presented during the opening was a gradual presentation to an incredibly detailed island, rife with graphical beauty, vegetation (including insects), villages, and some damn fine pixel shaded water. Then my beloved "consciences" from the original game (representing good and evil respectively) floated back in, ready to offer helpful, if somewhat patronizing commentary on how to play once more.. Then in short order, I was given the option to select my personal godly avatar (and gaming gimmick), the "creature". After being challenged to choose between a moronic-looking Ape, a silly-looking Cow, a somewhat ordinary-looking Lion, or a bad-ass looking Wolf, the choice was somewhat obvious (even for someone who considers himself something of a "good" god). Then, following some basic tutorials (through which my creature slept the entire time, inaccessible), I was whisked off to the first "mission" in the game’s actual campaign.

The storyline to Black and White 2 is actually a bit less epic than that of the original – in fact, it focuses on the big evil Greek empire, which is apparently roaming loose with its military might, ravaging the lands with warfare and tyranny and other nasty things that the native inhabitants apparently don’t like very much. As a god, your first task is to quickly swoop in and toss as many people into conveniently-placed portals as possible, then zoom off to the new land to reconstruct a new civilization from scratch to help fight off this armada. Or something. The problem is that despite an incredibly promising initial showing, the game quickly tapers off to show its flaws and problems as more and more gameplay options are revealed, and the faults soon began to wear down my experience the more I played. Once I started the campaign, I was introduced to the basics involved in building a city. In a manner somewhat similar to the original Black and White, city-building is accomplished by laying down "scaffolding" to aid the villagers in constructing buildings to meet their needs. Rather than waiting for the peasants to complete their own buildings, players can also choose to use "God-Building" to quickly construct a structure by dropping resources directly onto them, at a small loss in efficiency. It’s nice,

City-building is still based around a single "town center" as always, but this center has been overhauled to be interactive, and now offer comprehensive information. In fact, the town center will now tell you everything about your little outpost of the damned (or enlightenment, depending on your alignment), ranging from population, any current resource needs (note that "sleep" counts as a resource), morale, "popularity", and what kind of building the villagers would like you to construct next. As a neat measure to help aid expansion, players can now simply drag-and-drop buildings as needed to make copies of them to help aid rapid construction of a new area. After some time of development, cities will then become very much alive and a beauty to behold, with flower or pot shops offering up goods for villagers to place randomly around to help spruce up your city, farmers tending to their meadows and dropping off food, and the unemployed sitting around taking up space or getting pooped on by my creature.

It’s here that things go downhill, because expansion in Black & White 2 is quite different than that of the original. No longer is the size of the player’s "influence" (that is, the artificial ring around the city where players can pick up trees, hurl boulders, cast spells, throw dead people, etc) is now based solely around their towns impressiveness, rather than population, and this negatively impacts the game in two significant ways. One is that expanding out to make an attractive, well-laid-out town is now moronically convoluted, because the only way to increase impressiveness and morale to any noteworthy extent is to make a nice pretty, spread-out town. And the only way I found to do this was to lay down big, expensive, and "impressive" buildings at the very edge of my influence border so that it expanded outwards. This lead to a number of obvious development issues when I realized that the only way to "link" my two cities with pretty roads involved needlessly stretching out a chain of buildings at random until my influence got far enough.

The second problem is that occupying a town was done either by "impressing" them enough to join me, or to build an army (you get a cool barracks now where you can turn drunken rejects into disposable pawns for your military conquest) to run over and "capture" the town. Going the "good" route not only took a stupidly long time however, but also caused the villagers to just pack up all their junk and form an expedition party to march over and join my current city, leaving their old, productive village abandoned and unusable. The damndest thing was that even expanding my influence border over top of their barren village didn’t actually "activate" it to fall under my control – I still had to march my army over there to capture their town center, racking up a network of evil points. What happened to the good old days of having my villagers dance around a magical rock and then throwing it over to an unclaimed village to impress them with my godly antics, or just having my creature wander over there to garnish support for my cause? All of this is apparently no longer an option (the "magic rock" theory can’t even apply anymore, as most villagers never even really reacted to all the wild shenanigans I did short of "accidentally" rolling a boulder through their pathetic food store).

There is also much less of a focus on the creature now. The game’s greatest gimmick has now been dumbed down and stripped away of most of its erratic nature, leaving more of a "semi-automated drone with Attention-Deficit-Disorder" than a truly autonomous and learning entity. To this end, a "thought-bubble" appeared above my creature every time he went to do something, letting me know that "I’m going to throw that villager!" or "I badly need to poop". On top of that, thanks to a new UI implementation, I could now access any of the creature’s learned behavior with a single click (rather than needing to wait for him to perform the action first) and either pat him or kick his ass to make him more or less likely to perform that action. The issue however lies in that the creature’s behavior now seems dictated by a completely different set of policies that, put bluntly, really suck. Trying to assemble my creature into a "free-will" mode with him being strongly encouraged to do as much helpful, happy creature things as he could based on how he was feeling resulted in a wolf that then spent half of the game kicking around the beach ball I purchased for him using my special "tribute points" (which, as a side-note, can be used by players to purchase optional items such as spells, buildings, or creature toys) just because I decided I wanted him to "sometimes feel like playing with toys".

Amusingly, after hurling the beach ball across the current level into the middle of nowhere out of annoyance, the creature promptly took off after it, engaging and utterly annihilating the small squads of bandits roaming the area in the process. Eventually I got sick of this issue and began pimp-slapping his endearment for toys right out of his silly little head, which ended me up with a creature who decide to poop, then half way through the process run off to go plant trees or harvest grain (but would never actually feed himself or sleep as needed without my intervention, no matter how hard I tried to get him to do so). It seems as if the AI routines governing the creature focus too much on player interaction, and I feel this really ruins a lot of the unique attachment and "personality" provided to the creature types offered in the original Black and White. Obviously having a choice between a maximum of only four (five if you purchased a special bundle) creatures in total doesn’t really help either. The better option clearly would have been to maintain the approach Lionhead had with the original game, but actually fix it up and make it "workable" rather than peeling off in a completely different direction. Did I mention that you can’t slap cool tags and symbols on your creature anymore either? Or if you can, I certainly missed the setting.