Black And White Member Review for the PC

Black & Hype  

I first heard about Black & White through a friend of mine who said that this was a very good game. Taking his advice i decided to buy it hoping for a very engaging game. I thought it was during the first time i played it, but i stop playing it for a year (i was at the begining of moving to the second land last time i played it). I then looked at message boards saying that Black & White was a mediocre game that was overpraised. I did'nt think of it being true, and thought that this was due to gamers hate for hype, which surrounded Black & White. I recently started over playing the game to determine if the game was actually good or not. Soon i realized that the message boards were true, Black & White is a mediocre game.

   You see, Black & White had these very inovative concepts. First of all the controls, which would have you controll a disembodied hand, which opened up a unique way of controlling your character and a different was of casting spells and throwing items. You could also be a good or evil character which would give you access to different spells. You would try to impress your villagers in unique ways, which will turn into this mana-esqe system for you to cast spells and Miracales (another innovative concept), which will have you increase the rescources and the beleif that the villagers will have in you. It also had RPG elements that would have you do these objectives that would award you with other miracles to cast (a concept that gives Black & White character that is non-existent to other sim/god games). It also had a creature that can is also pretty unique.

    The problem is that these concepts arent executed well. You see, you can't decide what buildings you want your disciples (workmen you create) to create, instead they are the one who decide whether to create a house or a graveyard. Another problem is The creatures. Taking care of your creature seems to be more like a chore rather than an engaging game. It seems that you always have to take care of it. It's a nice idea to train you creature to tell it what food to eat or not, and what spells to teach it. What makes this bad in practice is the lack of information the game provides you on your creature. There are stats for your creature but none that I myself found to be useful. You don't get stats on what type of food your creature likes or what actions your creature is more proficiant in, etc. The combat system isn't very good either, due to the flawed controls and lack of strategy. Besides I don't see a point in having my creature learn miracles, when I can cast them myself.

   Although, the biggest problem of all is the amount of bugs in the game. These bugs aren't like the ones that create glitches, these are the ones that hurt the gameplay. Some of them I encountered are not being able to create certain disciples, not having villagers move into a house, not being able to cast miracles, and not being able to complete certain quests.

   So all in all, Black & White has very innovative ideas, but  this was ill executed do to lack of more development time because of a certain publisher's (cough*EA*cough) decsision to release the game still in development.

• + Good controls
• + Good & Evil alignment system
• + RPG elements
• + innovative way of converting people
• + Own a pet
• - That's a tedious chore to train
• -  weak & meaningless combat
• - bugs that ruin the game
• - Wasn't all that it could be