Has anyone played the Black & White series? it looks pretty good
bad as shit
EDIT: let me ellaborate.
The game claims to be some sort of spore-like game with a lot freedom to do what you want, and (important) supposedly a top-notch AI system, which is seen in things such as you being able to teach things to the creature.
However, the reality is other.
The game has pretty good graphics, I´ll give that to you, and it allows you to engage into redecorating the landscape (to an extent): you can move around trees and (small) rocks.
As for the gameplay itself, well, think about it as a dumbed down RTS game: you have your "temple", which is basically you: if it gets destroyed you are pwned. Then there are villages scattered around, which you have to try to convert to your side by basically casting spells around it. If you create food you are good, if you smite them with lightning you are evil (this part is important: smiting people with lightning is about the only fun part in the game). And if you are good or evil your temple will in turn look evil.
Once you control the town you can tell them to build stuff they might need (like, say, farm plots), and then assign jobs to the population, which they are sucky at performing (particularily, food generating jobs. Which is annoying because your people tend to starve unless you micromanage the food production process)
That aside, you also have this creature thing, which was hailed as the pinnacle of the game AI. Supposedly it is trainable. The reality is another: It can sort of cast some spells (like the ones you cast) for free. Repeat the spell enough times around the creature, and it will start casting it around. (This is about the only way to make agriculture work, btw, because you casting crop-growth spells is counterproductive, but the creature can do so for free continuously). It eats, too. If you give it people to eat another script kicks it and it starts cannibalizing your population. But that's about it. It doesnt behave particularily intelligently, and in fact, it's glaring bad AI will mean that you wont be able even to count in it performing the scripts intelligently.
The aim of the game is to get believers to produce mana to cast more spells at a bigger range, hopefully eventually being able to reach and destroy the enemy god (IF there is one, more on this later). Supposedly your creature can assist in this, but it is more often a nuisance than not. The campaign missions are full of little minigames which are rather silly and often pointless, and exist solely to make the game seem deeper than it actually is. Sometimes they pretend they affect the storyline. But they dont. The game levels are lineal, you cant stray from the main storyline.
The skirmish mode is pretty much the same, only since instead of being puzzle oriented like the campaign, you are matched outright to the sillyness of enemy AIs, it's far more boring.
In the end it's a grind: build your population till other town is in range (this can be very annoying, particularily if some town is very far away, as it happens in the sixth campaign mission, I think) and blast it into submission. Repeat ad nauseam.
Author
Topic: Looking for Strategy Games (Read 2136 times)