Black & White 2 [PC]

Giant creature in tow, visionary designer Peter Molyneux's latest creation is ready. Like its predecessor, Black & White 2 lets players literally play God, with a series of islands full of villagers, a towering animal servant who'll do your every bidding, and a bunch of opposing civilizations to dominate either through cultural superiority or military force. Improvements over the original are numerous but don't go far enough, and sadly some of the spark of the original has been lost in the process.

But one thing at a time. Developer Lionhead has indeed fixed a number of the gripes players had with the original game. Now you can tell what you're training your creature to do, and in detail. Your villagers aren't the needy bunch of dependents they were before; they're smart enough to prioritize more important tasks over others. And the combat system has certainly been improved.

You'll also be wowed by the graphics. Even the most cynical of jaded PC gamers should get a grin out of Black & White 2's visuals. Looking glorious on modern hardware, they scale reasonably well to older machines, so even if you're not set up with the latest in whiz-bang gaming PCs you should still have all kinds of pretty things to look at. You can zoom seamlessly from an overview of the whole island to a close-up of a villager collecting food in a matter of a second or so, and at every point in between it looks gorgeous.

Getting down to the game itself, Black & White 2 doesn't exactly get off to a good start. In fact, it gets off to an abysmal start, with a painful tutorial. Extended, patronizing, and badly voiced, you'll be hammering on every key you can find, looking for the one that makes it go away. You won't find it, and you'll dearly wish to set your creature on Black & White's oafish advisors. If you have to spend this long telling me how to play the game, something is wrong with the interface.

And is there? Like the theme of Black & White 2, many things with this game are both good and bad, including the interface. Navigating the map is a joy: as you zoom and pan your way around the island, you'll really feel omnipotent. Casting miracles, doing that Old Testament stuff like slinging hellfire, water, and lightning around the place -- it hits the nail on the head. Placing building templates and roads is very slick, too.

But then, most resource or population management tasks also have to be done by hand, micro-managing your goods or villagers into the right places. Building structures and buying new technologies (via the game's currency, "tribute", which you gain from completing quests and pleasing villagers) requires the use of a cumbersome toolbar, with over-large, unclear icons that keep moving around when you're not looking.

Creating and moving troops is a little better. Unconventional though the interface is, it's pretty easy to select and group units, and to give them basic instructions. Basic melee troops and archer units are the two choices, and both improve with experience. Yes, you can create catapults, but the AI is so inept at dealing with them that it doesn't seem fair.

Battles are just a matter of zerg-rushing the enemy. Produce more troops and you'll win. Specifically, the best path to victory is to micro-manage creating new regiments during the fight, hand-hold them round any obstacles in their way (so the crappy pathfinding doesn't get hung up on something) and throw them into the meat-grinder.