It’s fitting that Black & White 2 is a game about good vs. evil, since its wildly inconsistent features hit both ends of that cliché. The controls constantly frustrate, the repetitive gameplay gets boring, and it’s way too linear to enjoy shades of morality gray. Yet its idea of combining a pet simulation with typical real-time strategy gameplay--you build up town attributes by adding buildings and cultivating resources--is occasionally fun. It’s too bad that the glimmer of what could have been contrasts so much with the game’s reality.
You don’t need to have played the original Black & White, since this sequel takes a different path. That prior game was about training and playing with a huge creature, essentially a pet or life simulation. Black & White 2 still lets you pick a colossal lion, tiger, turtle, cow, or other animal, but you only need to give it attention occasionally. Unlike the original, Black & White 2 focuses on building and expanding towns.
Common real-time strategy conventions only occasionally surprised us, for good or bad. You’re balancing resources--ore, wood, and food--against costs to expand. Instead of instantly building houses, granaries, temples, and other structures, your giant god’s hand lays out the pattern on the ground. Your people then decide to build the object, and the creature can even help out.
Unlike other games that follow these rules, you can also micromanage construction, speeding things up with your divine touch. This building process is generally fun, and other resources--”tribute” from accomplishing world tasks and mana for calling down god-like miracles--add more initial variety.
Unfortunately, levels too often follow the same pattern. You’ll build up a town, and either expand the “good” way by enticing neighboring villages to join with your impressive structures, or, if you’re evil, you’ll just roll over them with an army. And the repetition seems worse because it can take hours to beat a single level in the “good” path; we were frequently bored, waiting idly for the town to improve instead of enjoying the process. The game keeps track of your good and evil deeds, but the practical difference is minimal.
While there are a lot of levels, including the bundled, fight-heavy Battle of the Gods expansion, control issues destroy any of that value. We constantly had trouble selecting items, picking up objects, and otherwise driving the game basics. The mouse never seems to hover over the object it grabs, and needlessly fancy gesture-based controls often don’t work. Sometimes you’ll have to repeat movements dozens of times to succeed; gesture and perspective issues complicate the simplest godlike action, such as tossing boulders around.
Creature angle twists basic RTS genre. Creature can help build, attack enemies, and otherwise participate. Players can call in miracles and divinely intervene. Stable programming never crashed. ESRB Rating: Teen.
Frustrating game controls. Slow, dull progress, especially in the “good” route. Good-versus-evil theme doesn’t leave much room for nuance.
