Afterlife

What if there was a game that let you manage Heaven and Hell, rather than theme parks or hospitals or major metropolitan centers? That's exactly what the LucasArts designers wondered one day, and the result is Afterlife. The setting was transported to a nameless planet and the inhabitants were made aliens to avoid any religious sensibilities, but you'll still be putting down zones where the Gluttonous are punished in "The Bowels of Hell" while the Diligent are rewarded in "The Eternal Afternoon". Pretty soon your afterlife will be brimming with brightly colored structures full of creative (and often hilarious) descriptions, as you zone out to a beautiful soundtrack that is perfectly suited to the spiritual theme. When it comes to looks and sounds and sheer creativity, Afterlife has nothing to be ashamed of despite its 20+ years of age. There's two flaws that mar the experience a bit. First, there's the artificial micromanagement in the early game where you mindlessly balance a slider. It's just an excuse to make sure you see all the pretty structures, but that doesn't make it better gameplay (in the middle and late game, you can afford the autobalancer). Second, once you've "completed" Afterlife by successfully reaching the ultimate structures (which essentially means you've won the game and will sit on an ever-increasing cashflow) there's not much reason to do it all over again. You can experiment a bit by focusing on one particular part of your afterlife first or manipulating the planet's beliefs to change the rate of SOULs coming and going, but that's not going to last forever either. If you like city builders, buy Afterlife when it's on sale. You won't get SimCity-levels of replayability out of it, but the aesthetics alone make it worth the purchase.

Right up there with StarTopia and Dungeon Keeper 2 as a theme-driven game that allows you to take an original perspective on familiar settings. It is all about that kind of pleasure that you get from listening to cynical british voice-actors and witty playings on words that keeps these kind of games from ever really getting very old. But honestly, it is mostly the music that is what gives this game its magic. Because the main menu has this weird polyphonic choral composition as a main theme that is just so creepy yet fascinating at the same time, you just have to be convinced that this is virtually a classy game, even though it might actually be mediocre - but the soundtrack by Peter McConnell (who would also do Grim Fandango) summons players to start a new game each time, simply because of these ironic spiritual themes that you kind of need from time to time, to take a distance from your own death almost. Still, as has been pointed out elsewhere, you cannot expect this game to entertain players for long, for it has only a narrow array of possibilities and promises, and honestly, as soon as the esthetic starts losing its edge and its thrill, the game's value is mostly spent - and you will have gotten your money's worth perhaps, or you will feel shorted yourself. Still, it is a unique setting and it has never been done better, and it is one of the cleverer heaven and hell simulators; and you can, for once, fight for both sides as you do not have to choose for good or for evil but get to cater to each in equal measure if you want your Afterlife to succeed; that alone makes it unique in the history of wasting time playing old games.

Afterlife plays and looks a lot like Simcity 2000, but brings a lot of new concepts to the city-building genre. The most distinct, of course, is that you can manage Heaven and Hell at once, essentially running two cities at the same time, but in opposite ways. In Heaven, organized roads and diverse zoning are essential, but in Hell, long winding roads and monolithic blocks of the same zone are needed. On that basic level, anyone can pick up the game and play it, and be entertained for a good few hours. The in-game tutorials are enough to get you started, but if you want to actually "win" the game (getting a billion souls in both Heaven and Hell), you'll need to read the manual, experiment, and delve into every minute aspect of the game. There's a lot that's not obvious, such as being able to interact with the "living world" you're drawing your souls from and influence their beliefs, which has varied effects on how they act when they arrive in the afterlife. Balancing each reward or punishment is also very important, and can get either very tedious or very expensive. There's a lot to keep track of, but it's an amazing feeling when you finally reach victory. Of course, the best thing about the game is the creative and funny design. Every building has a rather humorous description you can read, and you really get drawn in to the world that's created. While mostly played for laughs, you also get a dose of the actual bliss or torment you'd come to expect from Heaven and Hell, and some of the fates you can assign to the souls either give you the warm fuzzies or are genuinely cringe-inducing. Even a simple concept like a place in Heaven where you can find everything you ever lost, or a never-ending search for an empty space in a Hellish parking garage really stirs the imagination in a way that most SimCity-style games can't match. Definitely recommended- this one kept me busy for days, and is a sadly overlooked gem.

As it hasn't been mentioned already I just wanted to add: there's a lot of great (high quality, good voice acting, funny) speech in this game! Both your helpers have a lot to say about your management of heaven and hell and about the different buildings. As I remember it the game mechanics themselves are fairly decent, whilst the heaven and hell theme works very well, and the speech on top is what makes this a great game to have played.