Posted on: December 6, 2011
nitrogenfingers
Spiele: 330 Rezensionen: 48
A wonderfully unique power trip
I must have been seven or eight when I got my hands on Populous II, something my parents really need to be held to account for. With the graphic violence and religious intolerance the game seems to preach, only the period game Syndicate could be any more damaging for a young adolescent (which I received at age nine). The story is clever but barely acknowledged in-game- suffice to say you have a group of villagers you can control and your task is to increase their population and use them along with your own godly powers to destroy every person on the map who doesn't believe what you do. How did this game make it past the censors unscathed? Half the game is spent ensuring the countryside is suitable for your villagers to inhabit- this means flattening and raising large tracts of land so they can build increasingly large structures like temples and castles, which in turn generate more population. This often feels more like busy work than anything else but varied landscape and limitations on your powers do enough to keep it engaging for most of the game. As your population grows so does your capacity to cast godly powers, and here things get interesting. You'll start with an uncontrollable column of fire that chars buildings, damages land and cinders villagers with a hilarious animation. Later you'll have the capacity to cast lightning storms, earthquakes, swamps, baptismal fonts, volcanoes and fire rain. Your followers don't just stand idly by too- soon conflicts will break out as they wrestle for territory at the borders. Why not create a leader to start the campaign against your enemy, using the papal magnets? Better yet convert him into a mythical hero like Perseus and Odysseus and use him to devastate nearby villages. If this is all still not enough call an Armageddon- every person on the map will come to the centre for one huge battle royal to decide the winner of the bout. Even to me this sounds like rose tinting, and it is- I have a lot of fond memories of Populous II. I can't deny however that the game isn't perfect- for one the formula doesn't really change from start to finish, with the god powers providing most of the variation. You can't choose these, they're assigned according to the stage which is a bit of a disappointment granted the supposed RPG elements of this game. But that doesn't detract from the experience for me. It remains unique, exciting and vastly enjoyable. Very few games, even modern RTS games are able to produce the same sense of frantic activity Populous II achieves, without bogging you down with unnecessary details- the AI handles the small issues like pathfinding and troop organization so you can concentrate on having fun. Will the contemporary player enjoy Populous II? I really don't know- graphics are charming and aesthetically pleasing but hardly eye-popping, and the gameplay is a bit simple for the modern FPS player. But the refreshing thing about Bullfrog games is how much fun their games were with such simple underlying mechanics. Populous has just the right amount of depth- enough to keep things interesting but not so much as to make the game inaccessible. So I can recommend it to even modern gamers, because fun never gets old.
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