Rating: 
Summary: Just answering a few questions
Review: I've read many of the posts and, to be honest, I believe that people should give it more time. A lot of people are complaining about the micromanagement and the "poor" creature AI. But I'll get to these problems in a bit. What I really want to say is that this game is not for everyone. EVERYONE will not think it is the best game of all time. I don't. Yes, I gave it 5 stars, but maybe this game is not for you. I would definitely suggest playing the game at a friend's house or borrowing it before buying it. Anyway, I'm not trying to convince anyone here, and I'm not going to tell about the story (seeing as how that's what all of the other posts have done) but I will make a few points.First of all, many people don't like the micromanagement of the villages. A lot of people don't want to unceasingly supply the people with their every needs, which is completely understandable. But take note that the micromanagement system is very complex. If you give your people too much food, then they will want to reproduce, thus causing a desire for more houses, therefore more wood, and thus affecting all of your villagers' needs, just by over-supplying your villagers with food. So you can't give them everything they want. It's ok to let them be for a little while, but food is definitely the worst thing to over-supply them with. Acknowledged, this system is very tedious in the beginning of the game, demanding a lot of your time, and running out of trees can be a ... big problem. But, as others have said, get past the early, simple, repetitive tasks, and the game expands in customization. Teaching one's creature to handle the villages will save you a lot of time in the long run. It will allow you to do the side quests, or, if you are an evil god, to do the fun stuff (killing people!). Now, another thing I've noticed is that people are very discouraged with the Creature AI system, saying that the creatures are really dumb and don't listen to anything their master says, therefore causing the player to like the game less. However, I must point out that the creatures of these players are most likely young, with their gods having just started playing the game. Take note that human babies are not the most intelligent beings in the world either. They do not come into this world with the ability to learn things instantly. This is the same for the Creatures. True, in the beginning, it can be very repetitive, stroking or slapping the Creature multiple times for the same action before it gets it right. But again, the more time you spend with it in the beginning, the less time you have to spend with it when micromanagement calls later in the game (since it's never totally gone). Also, some people have complained about the saves failing, and this has never happened to me. What you have to do is actually enter the Temple and go to the Save Room and save it manually there, because the Auto-Save doesn't always save and let you load (Auto-Saves simply back up your creature's personality and your alignment, so that when you do manually save, it doesn't take 10 minutes). So, perhaps people didn't have the patience for these things. Or maybe they don't understand the complexity of the systems. If there's one thing this game does NOT do for you, it is to give you a white line to follow to beat the game. So again, rather than going by someone's word (including mine), try the game out for yourself if you can. There is so much customization to this game that you couldn't play it the exact same way twice if you tried. So if you want a game to beat and master quickly, this game is not for you, obviously. But one thing's for sure, it's not like any game you've played before. (Yes, you need a very good video card and computer to play this game smoothly, because low detail definitely ruins the experience. And yes, the graphics dominate my soul.)
Rating: 
Summary: God awful game
Review: Well, this has to be one of the biggest disappointments so far. I waited for a very long time for this game to come out and it's frustrating, tedious, and boring. First off the camera/movement controls are absolutely horrible. It's one of those games where you start yelling at the screen because trying to move around and figure out where you are is making you insane. Second the villager AI is even worse. These morons cant do anything on their own. They just sit/walk around...why is your creature AI so good and the villagers so bad? This game is pure super-micromanagement. You cant click and drag over a group of villagers to assign them a job...no, you have to pick up each individual one, work with the ackward movement/camera controls, and place them next to whatever it is you want to do. Lots of fun when you have 100+ idiots standing there doing nothing. And just wait til you get to the ship-builders and their ear wrenching song. I accidentally clicked the scroll above the ship and had to hear the whole thing over again, no way to get out of it. I figure if you like The Sims and Populous injected with alot of micromanagement and some really bad movement controls, you might like this game. Otherwise, stay far far away from this good idea turned bad.
Rating: 
Summary: Cool, but Somewhat Tedious
Review: Molyneux's achievement is truly remarkable. No one has done these sorts of things in video games before. During the first two weeks that I owned it, I was continually discovering new features and nuances of the game play. The graphics are brilliant and colorful, the world is rich and subtle, and the characters are hilarious. You can think of this game as a combination of "The Sims" and a real-time strategy game. Likewise, it has all the features that made "Creatures" fun, without all of the headaches of micro-management. While this game is both beautiful and exhilarating, it should be said that it is time consuming and sometimes exhausting. Some evenings I found myself not wanting to play because it was "too much commitment". Molyneux's goal was to make a living, breathing world and he was successful, but the unfortunate side effect is that sometimes that's exactly what we are trying to escape when we play games.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertainment for a time
Review: While Black & White contains some entertainment value, it becomes tedious after awhile. It starts out fun, but too much of your time is gradually wasted with micro-management for your worshipers. The AI creatures are very cool however, they really do learn and are able of performing some neat tricks. However again too much time is spent teaching them basic actions that should have been a lot easier (2 hours of potty training is not really fun). Additionally the game is too short if you want it to be. You can blaze through the included scenarios fairly quickly if you put your mind to it. While playing with the creatures is indeed fun, the game bogs down too much in micro-management details, that should have been dumped in favor of more fun gameplay.
Rating:
Summary: Good Graphics but Poor Gameplay
Review: Okay, i just stayed up till 4 in the morning with my first go at this game. The graphics are great, but so far, that's about it...even though i did a full install, i still have to have the cd in to play, which is something i hate. Next, controlling your character requires you to make "guestures" with your mouse which are all but impossible to do consistantly. After a few hours i had a few gestures of my own. Third, you can't skip the video screens, when i started the game, i had to watch 10 minutes of videos before i could start playing, i felt like i had paid 45 dollars to watch commercials...hey, i've bought the game already...enough. Finally, you have 20 or so challenges you can perform to start with, but there is no logical order in which to do them, and there is no logical way to achieve the tasks....I'm going to plod through this game and try to get my money's worth out of it, but its doubtful that i will.
Rating: 
Summary: Playing God
Review: The game is a lot of fun, if you like games like The Sims. Lot of fun to play online with other people. The one problem with the game is the first two land have two much tutoring and not alot of learn form your own mistakes. Else then that the games is great.
Rating:
Summary: Black & White great idea mediocre game.
Review: Black and White is a brilliant and engrossing game, no doubt about that. Unfortunately this game isn't nearly as fun as it should be. One of the fundamental problems is the designers decision not to use a traditional icon based interface. To cast spells you have to trace symbols in the air, this is definately a interesting Idea, but clicking a button, or pressing a key would undoubtably be easier. Worse still is building creation, where you have to gather wood, supply it to a mill, wait for scaffolds to be built, place scaffolds together in different numbers to create different buildings and then supply more wood to the buildings. The thing about the game is that the wood to make buildings task takes up most of the game. If it sounds tedious it is. Another fundamental problem is that well the Creature AI is phenominal the villiger AI is abysmal. Everything needs to be done for them. I really wishthe game eskewed its tenuous goal oriented structure for a more fluid sim-cityesque feeling where the user is free to define his own goals. Oh well, at least it looks pretty.
Rating:
Summary: It's cool, but...
Review: I liked Populus when it first came out on the Amiga - and here's the latest generation from the same author/creator. Superb graphics, great gimics, and some amusing moments. The caveat: very linear and, as a previous reviewer mentioned, high on micro-management. I was hoping for something that would be more strategy intensive but I am finding myself spending way too much time making wood, feeding worshippers at the temple, and setting down buildings and interacting with the critter to really be thinking about long term strategy. Also, after the bazillionth time of having the kindly Brit angel and the Jersey-accented demon pestering me, they're wearing thin. And I hate that I can't start over without having to go through the extremely protracted startup sequence and slow paced tutorial. It's fun, but I expect I'll be passing my copy along rather quickly to friends to save them the cost of disappointment. One last small gripe that myself and a few of my fellow women friends noted, you can't choose to be a 'goddess'. It's amazing with all this flashy artificial intelligence that's being bandied about they couldn't put in a few lines of code to accomodate gender pronouns! All in all, it's left me longing for the intense strategy and mayhem of Populus.
Rating:
Summary: Be prepared to pray a lot!
Review: I'm compelled to write a review about this game because it is groundbreaking in the fact that the gameplay *is* unlike any other game. If you find yourself bored by the same crop of first person shooters or command and conquer clones, you may want to pick up a copy just to try something new and different (but read on first to be sure...) Considering EA owns the rights to the Sim-City franchise, this game could have been accurately billed as "Sim-God." I think Amazon and the other reviewers have done a good job of describing the gameplay so I'll try not to be redundant. First off, when you first load the game - be prepared to spend a full evening playing around with it. The game starts off with a very well done introduction and teaches you how to move around, control the creature, cast spells, etc... You'll find yourself drawn in very quickly as you want to see what happens next and that is where the problems start. You see, when you first start out it's rather unclear what it is you ARE supposed to do in this game. Being weaned on many years of resource management games and trying to be a nice God, I spent a long time trying to keep my villagers happy, ("we need houses, we need food" yada yada yada), but they would never shut up! It's enough to make me go nuts and destroy everyone - which kind of makes me wonder if that's what God thinks of all of us but that's a different discussion. In any case, it took me a while to figure out they won't shut up regardless and I just need to progress with whatever I'm doing and ignore them. (That's a tip for all you new players.) So what is it you are supposed to do? Basically use your influence to take over villages which allow you to increase in power so you can take over more villages. At its heart it really is a resource management game much like Command and Conquer. Instead of building up a bunch of tanks and army men to take over the next town you cast spells and use your creature -in good ways or bad - to "wow" neighboring villages into worshipping you. If you don't, you're stuck in this constant state of inertia trying to please your villagers who are never satisfied with anything you do. This is quite the opposite of the "do anything you want" sales pitch EA's marketing department puts in their ads. Another myth is the concept of your creature having free will and the ability to learn. This is far from the truth. Basically the creature will do something and you either reinforce the behavior positively (petting) or negatively (slapping). Based on what you do the creature is "supposed" to do that same action more often or less often. At the risk of this entire review not making it past the censors at Amazon, I'll give you an example. You see, I picked the tiger creature - not the brightest but supposedly a good fighter. Well apparently it has decided it likes to poop on houses. It's kind of funny to watch, but the villagers understandably don't like this very much. I've been slapping the poop out of him (pun intended) but he won't stop. So much for the ability to learn. Instead I'm supposed to try to get him to poop in the fields as it'll help the crops grow. Well what am I supposed to do? If I place the poop in the fields it just stands there. If I hand poop to him, he'll just look at me funny or worse yet, try and eat it. I guess I'm the one that needs to be praying he poops in the fields so I can quickly pet him and reinforce the behavior. As far as the things the creature has done right, positive reinforcement doesn't really seem to make him continue to do the same action. I've found the whole concept of trying to "teach" my creature very frustrating and it's been more of an annoyance than an asset to the game. And fighting? It's kind of like playing Rock-em Sock-em Robots. There's no control. Instead you just mash a lot of buttons and (again) pray you end up the winner. When winning a fight against another creature becomes a necessity in the game (and I know it will eventually), my inability to do so will probably be the point I put down the game and never play it again. The review is harsh so far I know, but you see, in spite of these problems I still find myself drawn to this game. In fact, just writing this review has made me want to load it up again. The graphics and music really are top-notch and I haven't run into any bugs or system crashes (a rarety in the gaming world these days.) I'm usually the type that will give a game one or two days at the max before giving up on it. Even games I do like rarely hold my interest to the end. This game is a rare exception. I keep thinking, maybe if I do something differently... Reread the Amazon and DailyRadar reviews or jump over to the PCGamer site and read all the praise they've heaped on this game. Contrast it with the review I wrote and hopefully it'll help you decide whether this is the type of game you would be interested in.
Rating:
Summary: Fatal flaws ruin an otherwise winner
Review: It's been said by others, and I'll just reiterate all the same beefs: way too much micro-management can make this game seriously tedious after the first 40 hours. I mean like extreme, hang yourself with a noose tedious. While it's fun to play god, it's not that fun to have to continue to constantly, constantly build houses and tell people to farm for food when they're starving. If this applied in real life and everyone waited for God to build us houses and give us food, civilization would have ended a long long time ago. I also thought that it was totally misleading to have a save game feature, thinking you can try different things out and then return to the way THINGS WERE (like most games), only to load your saved game and realize your alignment's completely changed and anything that's happened to your creature stays the same too. This really ticked me off when I saved, then accidentally left the game on while fixing dinner. After half an hour, my fully grown ape had been killed by the comp's creature at least 8-10 times, and had shrunk every time he'd died, so that when I came back he was 10 percent of his original size. When I noticed how small my creature had gotten, I figured no prob, I'll just load the save game and get him back to his full size. But nooooo, he stays the same size, leaving me with the immensely crappy prospect of facing another 15-20 hours getting him back to full size. I mean give me a break, no way I'm gonna spend that kind of time JUST to get him back to the size he was. Ridiculous. I bought B&W the day it came out, played it like crazy for a week, (and loved it during that time) and haven't touched it in over 6 weeks. A shame, because it is perhaps the single most creative game I have ever played. Graphics and sound are stunning, and the creativity to come up with some of the gameplay was outstanding. This game has enough pros to kill a donkey, but its very few cons are REALLY negative and ruin the whole thing for me, and from the looks of most of these reviews, ruined it for a lot of other people too. Replayability? What's that?
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