For those who haven't played Black and White, the basic premise is this: the player is a deity, created by a single pure prayer from a mortal. This method of birth is characteristic of a deity's whole existence, in that its power wanes and waxes with the number of believers a player has. Also the game allows players to be as good or evil as they choose, and the game world morphs to reflect the alignment of the reigning god.

To top this off the player has a creature, which is an artificially intelligent beast somewhat analogous to a digi-pet, in that a player can feed it, teach it, and play with it to his heart's desire. The creature also learns and can eventually perform almost every task a god is capable of all without direct control, which to an enduring player can make them an invaluable asset in performing those menial tasks which distract from good ol' smiting. In addition, the player's creature also has an alignment (which can be completely different to its god). A creature that eats villagers all the time and wrecks buildings will grow scaly and horned, while a creature that dances in the gardens and waters fields will grow sparkly and be-rainbowed.

Using all of the above in Black & White 1, the player had to eliminate whatever other god inhabited the island they were on. A god with no believers died and so a player had to first eliminate or convert all of an enemy's followers and then destroy their temple. People could be killed in two ways: by a creature or by a player using deadly miracles (like fireball) against them. However, in the latter case the player could only directly manipulate the land within their 'sphere of influence' (a coloured, writhing border at the edge of the god's territory), and so was limited by their skills at throwing a fireball/rock/tree/villager at the distant enemy.

The alternative was to impress the enemy villagers, again through the creature or miracles. Putting food in an enemy's town store and watering its fields all helped gain belief and if this rose high enough the enemy town would convert to the new god (throwing a fireball also gains belief, but will likely as not kill the impressed villagers immediately following). No direct involvement in the villagers' lives could be made rather than designating them 'roles' (like breeder, or forester) and, to a very limited extent, laying down scaffolds for them to build.

Black and White 2 builds on this formula very well. The entire structure from the original game has remained intact with only minor tweaking. Things like pet training are now much, much, much easier through an intuitive menu (you can fully train a pet to defecate on fields for fertilizer in just a few clicks!). In the original one of the 'big things' was that there were no menus, and everything can and had to be done by using the mouse and gestures therewith. This time round an optional (but practically indispensable) menu bar/tool bar has been added to centralise your godly duties, sort of a divine UI. It is somewhat analogous to the temple in the original game in that while holding shortcuts for all your utility functions it also provides quick access to statistics, objectives and the like, and quickly becomes an invaluable aid throughout the story.

One of the biggest reasons for the menu is the addition of the new game dynamic, that of RTS. It was well known that a reputed designer from none other than Blizzard Entertainment joined the Lionhead team for the development of Black and White 2, and the result of this is almost entirely new game play focused around city building. In the original Black and White, through a complicated process, the player could put down buildings (as scaffolds) and eventually construct a large town, but ultimately the options available for construction were limited and the whole process was ungainly. Now the player can put down several dozen different types of structure simply from the menu (or by dragging an existing building, which allows you to place another building of the same type), and can not only assign builders from the population to construct it but can force its completion by 'god building', which consists of gathering the necessary resources and force feeding them into the structure.

In addition to this the game now has roads that can be placed by simply dragging your hand across the ground, which feels a bit like drawing a road. To add new road to an existing road you simply click on the old road and drag away from it.

New buildings by default will align to the nearest road, and all this adds up to allow the creation of huge metropoli in a short time. Which is good, because as of Black & White 2, whether you play good or bad most of the time in a given game will be spent building up your city. Indeed, if playing a good god, building is all you do, and if playing evil you need a large, high-population city in order to support your armies.

This focus can become annoying. It's exciting to construct your first city, and then better in the next level where all the tutorial constraints have died away, but after that you realise that each level you're doing the same thing: placing the resource pile, building some housing, constructing a temple and so-on and so-forth. If the enemies in each level were a little more intelligent there might have been some variety, some struggle, but funnily enough for all the effort Lionhead put into to making the creature a super intelligent virtual pet, they made the enemy AI as dumb as a short fencepost. Even on the levels where the AI is supposed to be a master builder, their towns look like abandoned gold mining settlements, and their military tactics consist of "send a unit in, that'll teach them…" [unit gets massacred by creature, single fireball, archers, whatever]… "I never had faith in that unit. Now you, if I send you in, we'll win…", and so on. Even a good-aligned player has no problem staying alive in the face of such primate-level enemies. Not too good for a games company that prides itself on intelligent entities.

To go into further depth about the single player campaign, it is a marked improvement over that in the original. It lasts ten levels, and even though each map can be completed much faster in B&W2 it still takes a good 20 hours of gaming to hit the end. Storywise, B&W2 feels much more… coherent. The world consists of four races: Greeks, Aztecs, Japanese and the Norse. You play the Greeks, at one point the mightiest of the four races but as the game begins the brutal Aztecs are assaulting and destroying the capital and slaughtering the entire population. You quickly have to relocate them through a portal to a new far-away land to rebuild before you turn your efforts to eliminating the Aztec foes.

In addition, this time round the player represents the only god in existence, as all the others allegedly perished following the events of B&W, and a prophecy exists that a great tribe, now fallen, would seek the aid of a god to rise to power. This is the backdrop against which you fight, and it adds a definite strength of purpose to your activities. Adding to this the objectives tab on the menu and the game further adds to its definite RTS feel.

However, there are some bad points. The game has definitely been EA-ified, in that all the features you'd expect to be part of it aren't, leaving only those you didn't expect. For example, the intuitive AI for the creature is great, but where is Skirmish mode? The answer is nuked. That's right, B&W2 has no skirmish mode and even more lamely, no multiplayer. You are restricted solely to the single player campaign and when you add to this that there aren't any dev tools shipped with the game it represents a pretty poor showing for the price you pay. Unfortunately incomplete games are becoming a trend in the modern big titles. It seems to be the attitude that names like Half-Life, Battlefield and Black & White don't need to be finished because the name will sell them, and this is tragic.

Three days after B&W2 was released it was announced a 120Meg patch was in the works, to counter how hideously buggy it was, and we recommend you download this before playing the game because in the tradition of we-don't-care-about-the-consumers-just-the-money the patch will render all your save games unusable.

Fortunately this only happened to Americans, as here in New Zealand the game was released after the patch and thus of the thousands of players that thronged the boards at Lionhead.com with complaints, cries of dismay and general dissatisfaction you'll find not one was from NZ or Australia. Ha ha, to say the least.

Also there is the graphical problem. The system requirements for Black and White 2 are very high, particularly if you have an Nvidia card over an ATI Radeon. At the highest graphical settings the technology used is not fully implemented in the drivers released by Nvidia and can cause the game to run very slowly. What is also annoying is that all the pretty little features, such as the grass getting covered with flowers and the trees glowing with fireflies (or the opposite if you are evil) are directly tied to the graphics options -- so the higher the pixel shading, for example, the more extra effects are enabled, even when these do not require the technology in question.

Also, when it comes right down to it, while B&W2 is a pretty game, its not that pretty. We have run games at much higher resolutions that looked much better than this but at half the hardware requirements, which says from a coder's point of view that Lionhead didn't spend much time optimising the graphics engine, to the detriment of the gamer. Another wrong step for a company that prides itself on its technical excellence.