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I decided to buy B&W2, since it was like half price. DVD collectors addition, DVD means less disk swapping for install, that's a good thing 
.
Anyway, problems started right away when the serial key didn't work. In fact it looked like part of it failed to get printed and some replacement letters got biro'd in. Um EA ....? Quality Control? clever?
I didn't feel inclined to deal with EA drones (especially in NZ) or bother returning it to the store (I bought it online), not the stores fault EA sucks anyway.
Since it's not a multiplayer game there is no real reason to have a legal serial, so I downloaded a keygen, a few minutes later the install was on it's way. I was extremely impressed to see it copying a giant file called "everything.stuff", I see these guys are pros
.
Anyway once the game loaded up I was subjected to the indignation of the movie and splash screens, which are UNSKIPPABLE (you're going to see that word a lot). But what's worse and insulting is the splash screens are advertising.
"Works great on Intel extreme ****e edition CPU"
and
"ATI"
Well don't that just make me feel special as an AMD and nVidia user? And UNSKIPPABLE, and you have to watch it EVERY TIME you load the game. And the game works terribly on nVidia, it took me ages of driver fiddling and stuff to get both B&W2 working smoothly and also other games on my system working.
Okay once into the game itself I got to choose a creature right away (yay!), and the early brain deadening tutorials are optional/skippable. Don't worry, this isn't a trend, it gets right back into the unskippable stuff.
The consciousnesses look considerably better than in B&W1, they are also more entertaining. They also hijack the interface quite often, for periodic being unable to play the gameness due to uninterruptible consciousness prattle. Not only am I a god, I'm a severely schizophrenic god who regularly claps his hands over his godly ears and screams MAKE THE VOICES STOP while his worshippers wonder WTF is going on with their god - like why he sometimes just goes idle for years of their puny little lives?
Lionhead follows the commendable policy of "It's not broken, don't fix it" and "If it's broken, break it some more", and finally "lets redefine not broken". Or at least it seems that way sometimes.
My main complaint is how much stuff is unskippable and how often you get trapped in uninteractive sequences. For a game that is supposed to be immersive this is simply terrible, so very much stuff is unskippable as to severely diminish replayability, being subjected to this stuff the first time through is bad enough.
But lets move on to more stuff that was broken and has been broken some more. THE INTERFACE.
In the original B&W something original was tried, an immersive game enviroment with very few buttons. This worked fairly well and achieved it's idealistic goals. B&W2 keeps much the same interface but has thrown the baby out with the bathwater - so to speak. You see a dirty great toolbar has been tacked on. It takes up like 1/4 the screen when opened. What's worse, the buttons are giant, this means you need to scroll A LOT to select stuff, it's only bearable thanks to the limited number of hotkeys. They've gone from an interface that was only un-ergonomic due to idealism, to an interface that is un-ergonomic due to plain bad design. If it's broken, break it some more and redefine broken. Or perhaps they just don't care.
Thankfully the options and save/load games are no longer in a big stupid temple, you get a straightforward and well designed menu when you hit escape. So they HAVE fixed some things.
But more stuff that is still broken - the whole way it deals with saved games and settings and stuff and general stability, it's as bad as in B&W1. Each saved game is like 25mb and are stored cryptically over multiple files and creature AI and profile settings and other stuff is scattered everywhere in folder names with random letter/number names. I managed to completely break my game by saving a game as it crashed, it would then simply crash on loading. Thanks to the cryptic profile/save stuff I couldn't figure out what I had to delete to make the game start loading again. If I deleted my entire profile it wouldn't regenerate a default profile and would continue to crash on start. I warn you, this game does not fail gracefully. In the end I had to uninstall and reinstall, losing my creature and all my saved games, just because of one bad save event. On the bright side I got to see "everything.stuff" again, I repeat, these guys know what they're doing! Stuff everything in one place! Take stuff and put it everywhere! logical structures are for big fat looosers!
I'm nearly done ranting now, almost ready to move on to praising. As I managed to praise at least one thing during the rant, I will also find more things to rant about, but from now on, the post will mostly be positive.
Once I got all my problems sorted out the game proved nearly completely stable. I don’t think it crashed once after I’d installed a driver it likes and tweaked the nVidia settings.
The game is a rather solid city builder, it's nearly great. The way roads building works is very nifty, you have much freedom in placing buildings. There is a wide variety of buildings you can place. Cities are fun to build and look cool. This is only slightly impeded by the interface, it is more impeded by needing to buy buildings with "Tribute" which is gimmicky. City Building is however a slow way to win. It is fun anyway, if you're into city building.
Overall the micromanagement is also very low, the interface is really quite well designed when it comes to micromanaging, to build multiple buildings of the same type you can just drag off one of the existing buildings and place a new foundation. It's way better than the old scaffold system.
You can use "multigrab" or something to pick up swathes of villagers at once; you can then drop them all at once as whatever kind of disciple you want. You can use the same thing to gather up swathes of trees. This is just plain neat and greatly reduces the number of mouse-actions needed to do what you want to do.
Also nifty is "god building", if you want something built in a hurry you can build it yourself! This costs extra resources but it's well worth it, no longer having to rely on the maggots to build vital stuff!
Villagers are self-sufficient, you are now a city builder and a god rather than a baby-sitter. Overall I love most of the city building aspects, both for good gods and evil gods. Good gods build big pretty cities where everyone is happy. Evil gods neglect most of the infrastructure in favor of a just plain large population that is miserable but functional, they don't whine about being unhappy, they just kind of accept that it's their lot in life. So an evil god isn't constantly subjected to "We NEED food!". We NEED offspring!". We NEED flying lessons!". Good gods aren't subjected to it either, needs are displayed as pillars in the city center.
Both good and evil approaches to city building work well.
The warfare model is extremely satisfactory, you basically draft the males into the army, thus putting a logical and sensible limit on army size. It's about the most natural way of creating a military I've ever seen in any mainstream strategy game.
City walls are a perfect defense against ground infantry. They are completely stumped by the giant towering walls of solid stone and can't just chop them down with the their puny swords.
Walls can be bashed down by catapults, creatures and gods. Basically something big and heavy has to hit a wall for it to break. Lots of little hits with something small and sharp doesn't do the trick. This is a good thing, although I wouldn't have minded them being able to scale the walls with ladders or something. As it is the enemy kind of just has a picnic at the base of your walls.
When armies fight it's pretty cool, it looks like a war. Your economy suffers due to lack of men. It's all done in a sensible, reasonable, enjoyable way.
Warfare is however REALLY REALLY REALLY easy. It doesn't matter how many units the enemy attacks with, your enemies are NOT gods, they are mere mortals in command of cities and armies. Gods vs Mortals is not very fair, as such you can simply smite attacking forces in any way you please, you can drop rocks on them, you can use miracles (fire, lightning), you can even slap them around with your hand. You can get your creature to kill them.
The creature is an incredible force of destruction vs platoons of swordsmen, it can take on dozens and dozens of swordsmen, it kills swathes of them in one blow. It can take out dozens with a single fireball. It's almost as good as a god at killing soldiers, and can do so outside of influence. This doesn't help to make the game harder. The creature cannot single-handily take over the map, but he can take out walls and other defenses all by himself.
He is very vunerable to archers, a platoon of like 50 archers will drop him in just a few volleys, unless he fireballs them all. Archers can be garrisoned on walls, however the creature is pretty safe from them when he's under the wall, he can kill them by bashing the wall (they fall off), by knocking the wall over (they go down with it), or by fireballing the wall (mass archer death). So defenses are no obstacle to your creature, even though it may take multiple attacks. The only thing you really need an army for is capturing town centers, and defending the forces doing the capturing.
In all ways the creature is an improvement over B&W1. He no longer learns by observation, rather he has a huge range of possible actions that he can perform, which he will actually perform depends on his experiences and training - you can choose to teach him lessons at any time. Like if you want him to eat villagers you can pick the "Eat villager" lesson from the (long scrolly toolbar of doom) and immediately he will think about eating villagers and you can slap or stroke him to reinforce the correct behavior. Some say this is a big step backwards because it's no longer a learning system. I like it because it's so much easier to make the creature useful, no longer do you need to spend hours training him to little effect, now you can shape him at your will. He also has his own personality and stuff still. My first creature had a tendency of getting depressed if he didn't get to stomp any enemy for a while.
Instead of training him miracles you just buy them for him using tribute (which is stupid, but works). Once you've bought the miracle for him he automatically knows how to use it. You can't really train him to use particular miracles in particular wars, like he'll automatically fireball enemy troops, you can only train him to be inclined to attack enemy troops, HOW he attacks them is entirely up to him. I like this system. For example I can give him the Heal miracle without even being able to cast it myself, this allows him to heal himself without me needing to get any "good" on my evil hands by training him in the arts of healing.
The creature also looks really cool and has great animations and stuff. The creatures really do look great.
Game Balance: Good vs Evil.
In B&W2 you can win maps by impressing the other side with your awesome city, if they are impressed, they immigrate to your city. This works surprisingly well and seems realistic enough. It's not like "We give up because you're so cool", it's actually sensible.
It's much quicker and less work though to just conquer, this is mostly because the enemy AI is dumb as bricks, like it wont rebuild destroyed walls or regarrison the walls with archers, this lets you use your creature to destroy walls with multiple passes. No great strategy or coordinated attacks are needed, you just wear them down.
Good cities look really cool, with lots of flowers in the grass and glowing magical fruit in the trees, and sheep in the bright green pastures, and happy people wandering along the roads. It's all bright and cheerful.
The evil city is all blackened with red lava cracks. Decorations are things like punishment spikes, to motivate hard work. People get stuffed into skyscrapers and slums rather than given roomy villas and mansions. When you zoom in you hear screaming and moaning. The whole effect works well.
You can be a good god with an evil creature (or vice-verca), the terrain around the creature reflects his alignment, like the evil creature will spread the blackened lava cracks. This is a cool effect too.
Miracles are mostly cool, and are casted in intuitive ways. Gone are compulsory gestures.
Considering the gameplay is so good, it's surprising how much uninterruptible unskippable stuff you get subjected to.
The only option for play style is a run through the 8 (I think) lands, there is no sandbox or skirmish option. You never fight another god. The game can be enjoyed in spite of this, but it does mean there's no way to enjoy the game without the unskippable un-interactive stuff.
Since you've read this far, it's time for the ranting and praising to end. It's time for the review of the most important thing. Boobs.
I would have said that B&W2 lacks boobs, but the Siren wonder is actually pretty good in this regard. However I feel the designers missed a real opportunity with the consciousnesses, instead of the fugly fat devil and the anemic bearded wise midget-man they could have had a smoking hot devil chick in like black lingerie, she could have the pointed tail and a whip. Then for the good conscious a hot angel in white robes. This would be way better because then the no-life loser males like myself could actually oogle while not listening to the consciousness's prattle.
In summary:
If you like city-building, you’ll like B&W2. But be prepared for a lot of frustration. The frustration is worth it though if you like this kind of game.
Compared with B&W1, it's a bit more frustrating in some regards but a much deeper game in most ways.
Thanks for reading.
.Anyway, problems started right away when the serial key didn't work. In fact it looked like part of it failed to get printed and some replacement letters got biro'd in. Um EA ....? Quality Control? clever?
I didn't feel inclined to deal with EA drones (especially in NZ) or bother returning it to the store (I bought it online), not the stores fault EA sucks anyway.
Since it's not a multiplayer game there is no real reason to have a legal serial, so I downloaded a keygen, a few minutes later the install was on it's way. I was extremely impressed to see it copying a giant file called "everything.stuff", I see these guys are pros
.Anyway once the game loaded up I was subjected to the indignation of the movie and splash screens, which are UNSKIPPABLE (you're going to see that word a lot). But what's worse and insulting is the splash screens are advertising.
"Works great on Intel extreme ****e edition CPU"
and
"ATI"
Well don't that just make me feel special as an AMD and nVidia user? And UNSKIPPABLE, and you have to watch it EVERY TIME you load the game. And the game works terribly on nVidia, it took me ages of driver fiddling and stuff to get both B&W2 working smoothly and also other games on my system working.
Okay once into the game itself I got to choose a creature right away (yay!), and the early brain deadening tutorials are optional/skippable. Don't worry, this isn't a trend, it gets right back into the unskippable stuff.
The consciousnesses look considerably better than in B&W1, they are also more entertaining. They also hijack the interface quite often, for periodic being unable to play the gameness due to uninterruptible consciousness prattle. Not only am I a god, I'm a severely schizophrenic god who regularly claps his hands over his godly ears and screams MAKE THE VOICES STOP while his worshippers wonder WTF is going on with their god - like why he sometimes just goes idle for years of their puny little lives?
Lionhead follows the commendable policy of "It's not broken, don't fix it" and "If it's broken, break it some more", and finally "lets redefine not broken". Or at least it seems that way sometimes.
My main complaint is how much stuff is unskippable and how often you get trapped in uninteractive sequences. For a game that is supposed to be immersive this is simply terrible, so very much stuff is unskippable as to severely diminish replayability, being subjected to this stuff the first time through is bad enough.
But lets move on to more stuff that was broken and has been broken some more. THE INTERFACE.
In the original B&W something original was tried, an immersive game enviroment with very few buttons. This worked fairly well and achieved it's idealistic goals. B&W2 keeps much the same interface but has thrown the baby out with the bathwater - so to speak. You see a dirty great toolbar has been tacked on. It takes up like 1/4 the screen when opened. What's worse, the buttons are giant, this means you need to scroll A LOT to select stuff, it's only bearable thanks to the limited number of hotkeys. They've gone from an interface that was only un-ergonomic due to idealism, to an interface that is un-ergonomic due to plain bad design. If it's broken, break it some more and redefine broken. Or perhaps they just don't care.
Thankfully the options and save/load games are no longer in a big stupid temple, you get a straightforward and well designed menu when you hit escape. So they HAVE fixed some things.
But more stuff that is still broken - the whole way it deals with saved games and settings and stuff and general stability, it's as bad as in B&W1. Each saved game is like 25mb and are stored cryptically over multiple files and creature AI and profile settings and other stuff is scattered everywhere in folder names with random letter/number names. I managed to completely break my game by saving a game as it crashed, it would then simply crash on loading. Thanks to the cryptic profile/save stuff I couldn't figure out what I had to delete to make the game start loading again. If I deleted my entire profile it wouldn't regenerate a default profile and would continue to crash on start. I warn you, this game does not fail gracefully. In the end I had to uninstall and reinstall, losing my creature and all my saved games, just because of one bad save event. On the bright side I got to see "everything.stuff" again, I repeat, these guys know what they're doing! Stuff everything in one place! Take stuff and put it everywhere! logical structures are for big fat looosers!
I'm nearly done ranting now, almost ready to move on to praising. As I managed to praise at least one thing during the rant, I will also find more things to rant about, but from now on, the post will mostly be positive.
Once I got all my problems sorted out the game proved nearly completely stable. I don’t think it crashed once after I’d installed a driver it likes and tweaked the nVidia settings.
The game is a rather solid city builder, it's nearly great. The way roads building works is very nifty, you have much freedom in placing buildings. There is a wide variety of buildings you can place. Cities are fun to build and look cool. This is only slightly impeded by the interface, it is more impeded by needing to buy buildings with "Tribute" which is gimmicky. City Building is however a slow way to win. It is fun anyway, if you're into city building.
Overall the micromanagement is also very low, the interface is really quite well designed when it comes to micromanaging, to build multiple buildings of the same type you can just drag off one of the existing buildings and place a new foundation. It's way better than the old scaffold system.
You can use "multigrab" or something to pick up swathes of villagers at once; you can then drop them all at once as whatever kind of disciple you want. You can use the same thing to gather up swathes of trees. This is just plain neat and greatly reduces the number of mouse-actions needed to do what you want to do.
Also nifty is "god building", if you want something built in a hurry you can build it yourself! This costs extra resources but it's well worth it, no longer having to rely on the maggots to build vital stuff!
Villagers are self-sufficient, you are now a city builder and a god rather than a baby-sitter. Overall I love most of the city building aspects, both for good gods and evil gods. Good gods build big pretty cities where everyone is happy. Evil gods neglect most of the infrastructure in favor of a just plain large population that is miserable but functional, they don't whine about being unhappy, they just kind of accept that it's their lot in life. So an evil god isn't constantly subjected to "We NEED food!". We NEED offspring!". We NEED flying lessons!". Good gods aren't subjected to it either, needs are displayed as pillars in the city center.
Both good and evil approaches to city building work well.
The warfare model is extremely satisfactory, you basically draft the males into the army, thus putting a logical and sensible limit on army size. It's about the most natural way of creating a military I've ever seen in any mainstream strategy game.
City walls are a perfect defense against ground infantry. They are completely stumped by the giant towering walls of solid stone and can't just chop them down with the their puny swords.
Walls can be bashed down by catapults, creatures and gods. Basically something big and heavy has to hit a wall for it to break. Lots of little hits with something small and sharp doesn't do the trick. This is a good thing, although I wouldn't have minded them being able to scale the walls with ladders or something. As it is the enemy kind of just has a picnic at the base of your walls.
When armies fight it's pretty cool, it looks like a war. Your economy suffers due to lack of men. It's all done in a sensible, reasonable, enjoyable way.
Warfare is however REALLY REALLY REALLY easy. It doesn't matter how many units the enemy attacks with, your enemies are NOT gods, they are mere mortals in command of cities and armies. Gods vs Mortals is not very fair, as such you can simply smite attacking forces in any way you please, you can drop rocks on them, you can use miracles (fire, lightning), you can even slap them around with your hand. You can get your creature to kill them.
The creature is an incredible force of destruction vs platoons of swordsmen, it can take on dozens and dozens of swordsmen, it kills swathes of them in one blow. It can take out dozens with a single fireball. It's almost as good as a god at killing soldiers, and can do so outside of influence. This doesn't help to make the game harder. The creature cannot single-handily take over the map, but he can take out walls and other defenses all by himself.
He is very vunerable to archers, a platoon of like 50 archers will drop him in just a few volleys, unless he fireballs them all. Archers can be garrisoned on walls, however the creature is pretty safe from them when he's under the wall, he can kill them by bashing the wall (they fall off), by knocking the wall over (they go down with it), or by fireballing the wall (mass archer death). So defenses are no obstacle to your creature, even though it may take multiple attacks. The only thing you really need an army for is capturing town centers, and defending the forces doing the capturing.
In all ways the creature is an improvement over B&W1. He no longer learns by observation, rather he has a huge range of possible actions that he can perform, which he will actually perform depends on his experiences and training - you can choose to teach him lessons at any time. Like if you want him to eat villagers you can pick the "Eat villager" lesson from the (long scrolly toolbar of doom) and immediately he will think about eating villagers and you can slap or stroke him to reinforce the correct behavior. Some say this is a big step backwards because it's no longer a learning system. I like it because it's so much easier to make the creature useful, no longer do you need to spend hours training him to little effect, now you can shape him at your will. He also has his own personality and stuff still. My first creature had a tendency of getting depressed if he didn't get to stomp any enemy for a while.
Instead of training him miracles you just buy them for him using tribute (which is stupid, but works). Once you've bought the miracle for him he automatically knows how to use it. You can't really train him to use particular miracles in particular wars, like he'll automatically fireball enemy troops, you can only train him to be inclined to attack enemy troops, HOW he attacks them is entirely up to him. I like this system. For example I can give him the Heal miracle without even being able to cast it myself, this allows him to heal himself without me needing to get any "good" on my evil hands by training him in the arts of healing.
The creature also looks really cool and has great animations and stuff. The creatures really do look great.
Game Balance: Good vs Evil.
In B&W2 you can win maps by impressing the other side with your awesome city, if they are impressed, they immigrate to your city. This works surprisingly well and seems realistic enough. It's not like "We give up because you're so cool", it's actually sensible.
It's much quicker and less work though to just conquer, this is mostly because the enemy AI is dumb as bricks, like it wont rebuild destroyed walls or regarrison the walls with archers, this lets you use your creature to destroy walls with multiple passes. No great strategy or coordinated attacks are needed, you just wear them down.
Good cities look really cool, with lots of flowers in the grass and glowing magical fruit in the trees, and sheep in the bright green pastures, and happy people wandering along the roads. It's all bright and cheerful.
The evil city is all blackened with red lava cracks. Decorations are things like punishment spikes, to motivate hard work. People get stuffed into skyscrapers and slums rather than given roomy villas and mansions. When you zoom in you hear screaming and moaning. The whole effect works well.
You can be a good god with an evil creature (or vice-verca), the terrain around the creature reflects his alignment, like the evil creature will spread the blackened lava cracks. This is a cool effect too.
Miracles are mostly cool, and are casted in intuitive ways. Gone are compulsory gestures.
Considering the gameplay is so good, it's surprising how much uninterruptible unskippable stuff you get subjected to.
The only option for play style is a run through the 8 (I think) lands, there is no sandbox or skirmish option. You never fight another god. The game can be enjoyed in spite of this, but it does mean there's no way to enjoy the game without the unskippable un-interactive stuff.
Since you've read this far, it's time for the ranting and praising to end. It's time for the review of the most important thing. Boobs.
I would have said that B&W2 lacks boobs, but the Siren wonder is actually pretty good in this regard. However I feel the designers missed a real opportunity with the consciousnesses, instead of the fugly fat devil and the anemic bearded wise midget-man they could have had a smoking hot devil chick in like black lingerie, she could have the pointed tail and a whip. Then for the good conscious a hot angel in white robes. This would be way better because then the no-life loser males like myself could actually oogle while not listening to the consciousness's prattle.
In summary:
If you like city-building, you’ll like B&W2. But be prepared for a lot of frustration. The frustration is worth it though if you like this kind of game.
Compared with B&W1, it's a bit more frustrating in some regards but a much deeper game in most ways.
Thanks for reading.
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