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Summary: What a Game!!!!!!!!
Review: this game is sooooo cool. it has the best graphix! i'dreccomend this to anyone who likes "controlling" games. ...
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Summary: To buy or not to buy? Are you crazy? Pick it up!
Review: If you're like me then you're reading through everyone's review in an attempt to determine if Black & White is worth your hard-earned cash. I definitely think it is! To be honest, I'm more of a sports and action gamer which makes me even more impressed that a game from the fantasy/role playing genre could be so fun and addictive. I had heard of Black & White before its release but wasn't quite certain what the game would be like. In case you are a bit uncertain you play the role of a God who is created by a single prayer. From there you rule over tribes, spanning 5 amazingly detailed landscapes, and battle other Gods in an attempt to become the ultimate, and only, God. To help you along the way you will have allies, but the most important help comes in the form of the Creature (cow, ape, or tiger) you choose in the first land. Your creature can be taught to do things that you do, such as supply villagers with wood and food and cast miracles. After he learns things, you can focus your attention on more important issues, although I do suggest checking on your Creature every so often to make sure he isn't eating your villagers or throwing boulders at their homes. Your Creature will grow in size, as long as he is fed, and will slowly morph to match his characteristics. If he is a troublemaker then he will acquire a more demonic look as opposed to a "fairy tale" appearance for a more caring and helpful Creature. Cinematics help to move the story along and are very entertaining! So are your spiritual advisors who pop up to inform you of their views (good and evil) and advise you on what you should do. But you should remember that this description is just a brief one and only scratches the surface of what Black & White has to offer.What makes Black & White so incredible is that it is the first game from Lionhead Studios. This means Lionhead created all their programs and game codes from scratch with this game in mind, which is probably one of the reasons it was 4 years in the making! Black & White is also amazing because the depth of play is unbelievable. There are so many different styles of playing and ways to complete tasks that replay value is extremely high! The voiceovers are perfect! Nothing is better than a great story combined with great acting. The graphics and animations are amazing. Landscapes are highly detailed, complete with animations of things such as trees swaying if you brush by them and fish swimming away if you or your Creature touch the water. Of course one area that can make or break a game is the Artificial Intelligence. Luckily Lionhead Studios hired Richard Evans for this task. Believe it or not this guy has a Masters degree in A.I. The villagers are very bright people and if something needs to be done, like building a house, then most villagers will help. Of course, there are lazy villagers who just sit around. I usually turn these slackers into disciples, meaning you pick one task for them to do for the rest of their life, such as builder, farmer, forester, breeder, fisher, etc. Your creature is also very intelligent. He can take care of himself and will usually stay busy, but the fact that he can actually learn from your actions is great! He also learns by watching the villagers. For example, if he watches the villagers take grain from the field and place it in the village store he will start to do the same and the villagers love him for it, and of course this means they love you for it and in turn this makes you more powerful! Another positive note about the game is the camera angle. Most games are limited to a handful of options or just the default. Not Black & White! You are in control of a camera that can circle 360 degrees around the landscape and tilt from ground level to bird's eye view with unbelievable zoom capabilities! Just how good is the zoom? Well, you can start with a close-up of an apple (complete with wiggling worm) that is sitting on a barrel and zoom out until you have a complete view of the land from above the clouds! This means there are no restrictions on how you view your world. Combine all these features with a great website at bwgame.com and great fan sites that offer unlocked Creatures, tips, and unofficial extras and you have one of the best games of all time! Of course, no game is perfect! But the drawbacks are really nothing that take away from the actual game. First are the controls. The default setting has you use the mouse to navigate the landscape with a grab and pull/push method. This can easily be changed though by visiting the options menu. Second are the load and save times. These are rather lengthy but are well worth it when you see the game. Third is the fact that this game was designed for higher end systems and could lag on an older computer. But I guess this could be a positive for those of you with blazing fast systems. Finally the most annoying part of any game like this is the fact that it is ADDICTIVE! The reason this makes it into the drawbacks is because I have stayed up way too late playing it and have therefore lost precious sleeping time! I see that I have written an awful lot! I hope I was helpful if you are contemplating the purchase of Black & White. I definitely recommend it! Well, I'm gonna go play it now and probably won't get to sleep until some time tomorrow morning. That damn game!
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Summary: WOW!! seriously does it get any better than this.
Review: I have owned this game for about 3 days now and all I can say is WOW! The creaters of thus game stopped at nothing to make a truly awsome game well, they did just that. prepare to lose a lot of sleep, you will be playing this game for days........non stop. Go buy this game, ya you stop reading and go buy this game, oh and you just wasted 30 seconds of your life reading this.... it was worth it.
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Summary: Great game, with some caveats
Review: First, I have to totally agree with Gamespot's reviewer who said, "...[Black and White] was obviously a labor of love for Peter Molyneux [the designer]..." This game is gorgeous, complex, and takes the concept of strategy gaming to a new level. I've played few games that so immersed me in their storyline or so dazzled me with technological brilliance. However, this game is a monster. I recommend a quick CPU and decent 3D card (I'm running 1G Athlon, GeForce 2 MX, and 768MB RAM...although there's no way you'll need that much RAM) to handle the overwhelming amount of processing this sort of environment (full, screaming, animated 3D worlds) requires. Additionally, if your system isn't the most stable, reinstall it and MAKE it stable. If anything is going to crash it, THIS game will. My own GeForce2 MX drivers have given me fits, until a new release gave me some respite. Also, check out bwgame.com to fix the Level 5 Creature bug BEFORE it happens to you. Only a few bothers: 1. Society seems awfully wood-based, relying on the collection of wood for the majority of improvements. This is weird. 2. Control is rather imprecise. Make sure you're familiar with shortcuts and waypoints...or invest in a Strategic Game Controller. 3. Don't click on silver scrolls if you haven't finished exploring the world. Silver scrolls will drag you through the story line sometimes, and the story CAN be a little bothersome if you just want to PLAY. 4. It's impossible to just re-start the game (other than skirmish) without going through the entire creature training and bother. This is an adventure-game element that is annoying. Make sure you save your games. 5. Autosave can be a pain, as the saves get longer and longer as the game progresses. Check out bwgame.com for more info about this. If you've got the system for it, and you're looking for real-time strategy with a twist, Black and White is undoubtedly the best game for you.
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Summary: Black & Blacker
Review: Somewhere between 3 and 5 years in the making, Black & White disappoints and irritates on so many different levels that it's hard to know where to start. The non-intuitive control system takes hours of getting used to, and even then is clumsy and unresponsive. The graphics are not on a par with such recent titles as Giants or Sacrifice, the landscape morphs and warps as you move around it and the villagers, well, the less said about them and their unfeasibly large feet the better. The sub-plots are supposed to be humourous but are merely twee, as are the good and bad advisors. Much has been made in the gaming press of the creature AI and it may well be the best ever in a computer game, but the game itself, which should surely be the most important part, is sadly lacking. This may well be selling swiftly, but will be returned to retail outlets just as fast by all but the most persevering of gamers.
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Summary: Micromanagement heck
Review: If you read all of the other reviews you will notice something...no one has gotten very far in this game. Why is this? Its micromanagement until you give up in frustration. Your people always need something, and they can't do hardly anything for themselves. You have to continuously build things for them, and they are never satisfied nor do they ever do anything to help. They die because they can't leave your temple to get food or rest, so you have to tell them when to do that. They complain if you don't make enough houses for them....and there are never enough houses. If you get ahead, they have more kids right away and then they want more houses. And this is only for one villiage, in the first scenario past the tutorial you end up with at least three to start with- each needing its own individual attention. So you give up on them and try to get somewhere in the game. Then the other gods are constantly telling you to do things for them. Then you need to convert villiages away from the other gods, but once your creature gets to the villiage he has been fried by lightning bolts and dies to be resurrected in your temple. So you tell him to go out again and you wait for 5-10 min while he runs back to where he once was. All the while you are getting nothing done so you have to micromanage your villiages some more, oh wait your creature is getting attacked again and has died. Send him out again, try and make some more houses, but you are low on lumber....cast a miracle, oh wait your worshippers need more food, go get them some from the stores (since they can't do it themselves), now cast the miracle....where is that creature now? And hey your ally has lost a villiage, but you cant get it back for him because it is in his sphere of influence. Go check your creature....hes died again. Lets look at his stats in the creature room.....he doesn't think you spend enough time with him, what a shock. I have played many games from first-person shooters to strategy games. This has got to be the first game I have ever gotten so frustrated with. I've played this game for over 20 hours and I've gotten nowhere except past the tutorial and 15 hours into the first scenario with nothing to show for it but a cow who can throw lumber into the stockpile. If you want to waste your time there are certainly more exciting game, and more rewarding experiences to have out there. Go find one of them. Even Daikatana would be more worthwhile and less frustrating than this.
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Summary: Waste of Time and Money
Review: Overhyped, underdeveloped. Shrot linear plot/storyline where fluid was promised, terrible amounts of micromanagement, AI on the creatures is not adaptive, just rote canned "behaviors" that you can enable or disable. Save your pennies kids, there's MUCH better out there.
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Summary: Had To Return Game
Review: I had to return the game because the software locked up my PC. I have a Gateway 650mhz/128 MB which could not run the game. I spent 1 hour with the Electronic Arts Technical Support and we were not able to resolve the issue. It seems like a cool game but my machine could not support the software.
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Summary: This game will blow you away
Review: IF your hardware supports it. If you have some antiquated junk of a PC (more than a year old) you may want to look elsewhere for your fun. If your system can run it though this is THE strategy/RPG game to own. Graphics are overwhelming, AI is mind-boggling, story and gameplay are truely unique and inventive. Think Populous meets the Matrix on HEAVY steroids. One thing I'd like to note: Jeremiah Teague and other reviewers have complained about the amount of micro-management involved; how people can only be assigned a task one at a time. While it IS true you can only assign people a task one at a time, they WILL continue to work and breed all on their own without your help. They do need you to tell them what to build and, unless you set them to a specific task, what they do will vary from time to time allowing gaps in supplies of food, wood, and children... just for you to step in and make them happy.
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Summary: Superb, but now flawed.
Review: Let me start off by saying I knew nothing of this game until a few days ago. At that time, I noticed it and started reading reviews, checking out user comments, etc and got caught up in the hype. After some recent technical difficulties forced me to upgrade my computer's graphics and sound cards, I was itching for a game to test it out (I usually restrict games to my Playstation 2). I just had to get Black And White to give it a shot. First of all, I had NO problems at all installing this game on my pc. I performed all the cleanup tasks before hand per Lionhead's installation instructions (Scandisk, Disk Defrag, and Disk Cleanup). I have an AMD Duron 700 with 128 mg of Ram and a recently installed 32MB Radeon VE graphics card. I don't think the game would have fared well with the 8MB Nvidia card I had before, but I expierience minimal slowdown with my current system configuration. Anyhow, the games graphics are superb. A Great deal of detail has been put into the scenery and your ability to zoom in and out of it is amazing. However, I do think the villagers could use a little more differentiation The controls are certainly interesting. I initially thought they were quite cool. I use a trackball instead of a mouse and didn't have a lot of problems to start. However, that changed when I played the game. I found it difficult to move around at times and/or to select the proper thing (in a short period of time) due in part to the constantly changing camera views. I've had some bad things happen as a result (such as my ape eating a key villager before I could get to him to stop him). I did find a few glitches in the system though which can lead to frustration. There was one instance where I had my creature save a drowning man. When he put the man on dry land, the guy was still drowning on land??? I came back later and found the guy still there in the grass with his body half immersed and arms flailing asking for help. Not sure what happened with the game there. Anyhow, overall, I think the game is really quite superb. It can get tedious at times (particularly if you're trying to be a good god) but what do you expect?? Let's face it, it you were a god and had to try to impress your disciples on a regular basis to make sure they believe in you, well, that would be a very tedious life. Seems very realistic to me for the villagers to want/demand more and more divine intervention if they are to believe in a higher being. The game is certainly worth trying if you're interested in it at all.
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