Populous™: The Beginning

This game was incredibly cool for its time. By then, nobody ever made 3D spherical terraformable maps and I'm sure it's not easy to find something like that even now. Yes, the graphics are too simple yet beautiful and comfortable at the same time. Maybe the only drawback nowadays is not having a skirmish mode vs the AI but the campaign is more than worth it. Some maps can be achieved in many different ways (I still remember one of those, where I leave the starting area and move to an island which i keep extending with the spells) Give it a try and enjoy the campaign. It may be boring the first 4 or 5 levels but once you get tools to use the terrain in your favor, it is much more enjoyable. And some worlds are incredibly difficult, like the one in which you have to rescue your shaman in 15 minutes only using your followers like a commando.

Okey got it to run on Windows 10. At first when I run it it would just show up that game has crashed. That's it. After that I tried running it as administrator but that would freeze the computer. After that I just went to game installation location and run popTB.exe and it would run without a problem. Don't know what the issue is really because I still can't run it from Gog application or directly from application shortcut that was created by installer. Still I'm glad I can play this game at all.

When Populous: The Beginning was announced back in the late 90's many people were skeptical. Not only was it created without Peter Molyneux, it also largely abandoned the concept of the original games. Rather than a god-sim this is "just an RTS". But what an RTS it is! Rather than being another Warcraft or C&C clone this one went its completely own, novel and brilliant way. Base building is simple and resource gathering almost non-existent. The center of the game is the incredibly powerful shaman unit who is each player's avatar. She starts off weak, just able to throw fireballs but as the campaign progresses she becomes so powerful that The Beginning puts any god-sim to shame, eventually being able to let fire rain, volcanoes explode and simply shape the world. But a shaman requires followers to gain mana and even she has her limits and won't be able to stop a huge army of warriors. The result is an incredibly fun, dynamic and chaotic game about huge battles and insane destruction. The view of an enemy's village going up in flames and being torn apart by tornadoes while warriors and simple villagers massacre each other never gets old. Neither does using a fireball to catapult the enemy shaman into the sea. The campaign is long, the missions diverse and the multiplayer timeless. The game not only plays well, it also has beautiful unique visuals and music which hold up to this day and provide a hauntingly alien yet beautiful atmosphere. Also the technical execution is mindblowingly good for a game this old and aside from the occasional pathfinding problem there's nothing I can complain about. It can be honestly said that there has never been anything like Populous: The Beginning before or after (although Sacrifice had some similarities), as a result this game is perfectly timeless and absolutely deserves to be played. To me it's not only one of the most original but easily best games ever made, both in singleplayer and multiplayer.

I have this game as physical box, not on GOG, it is really fantastic. My young me have to make a great review !

It is a quite unique game, for 20 years I haven't seen anything like it. Was my pleasure to play it again. Works well on Win10.