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PC | Strategy | Black & White 2

Boxart for Black & White 2
Black & White 2 75 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 5.0
  • SOUND: 4.5
  • CONTROL: 3.5
  • FUN FACTOR 3.5
  • AVG USER SCORE n/a
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 4.0

Review: Black & White 2

Review by Boba Fatt | 10/04/2005 | 09:47:50 AM PST

The rock star creators of Black & White return to take another shot at the ultimate God game. But are a streamlined interface and new RTS-style combat feature enough to lure burned gamers back?

The original Black & White was touted as the second coming of the pixel until its mouse-smashing interface, vague goals and banal gameplay pulled the plug on one of the most beautiful games ever. Now the superstar creators have teamed up with alums from the benchmark RTS StarCraft to bring the franchise into a new realm by structuring the game around economic and militaristic warfare. The result is vastly more playable, but still falls short of the series' graphical capabilities and ideological potential.

Creatures of War
In Black & White 2, you're still a godlike hand guiding a village while raising and training a giant creature to do good or ill. Although the interface has been streamlined, movement is still clunky and precise city layout or rock tossing is nigh impossible. And those StarCraft developers have fallen way short, delivering a poor battle interface, making combat vague, frustrating and untrustworthy. The communicative, compelling and very helpful creatures, however, are by far the most improved aspect from the original.

Men of Money
Surprisingly, the economic aspect of B&W2 is far more compelling and delivers a much richer experience. Played as a city builder, B&W2's strikingly grand structures sit beautifully on its gorgeous countrysides, enabling you to create vast, bustling cities that will impress your enemies into willing submission. You'll swoon with them, too, since the astoundingly rich graphics offer stunning detail down to the blooming flowers and wind-bustling trees. This is a rig-boasting visual feast from top to bottom, and the audio package compliments it nicely with unobtrusive music, clever and funny sound bites from your angel and devil escorts and razor-sharp effects, like howling wind when you telescope up to an orbital point of view.

Black & White 2 is a vast improvement over its predecessor and offers dazzling visuals, but it falls short of a complete RTS or city-building experience.