Black & White 2

Overview

Black & White 2 is a god simulator developed by Lionhead Studios and published by Electronic Arts. It was released October 7, 2005. The concept of the game is to provide the player with complete "god" abilities; ranging from constructing buildings to picking up people and casting miracles. The idea was originally conceived by Peter Molyneux in the prequel, Black & White.

Plot

In the beginning of the game, you witness a grand civilization, which you later find out to be your civilization, under siege by a gigantic army. This army is ruthless, and intends to annihilate your entire country. You also later find out that the civilization killing all of your people are in fact the Aztecs.

After this cutscene depicting the slaughter of your people, you are spoken to by an angelic old man, and a similarly stylized devil character. The angelic character depicts "good" and the devilish character depicts "bad". These characters serve as a tutorial device, and teach you the mechanics of the game. They teach you a range of things, such as how to interact with the world, how to build, and eventually allow you to pick a pet. You choose from four beasts. There is a lion, orangutan, wolf, and cow to choose from. The angelic and devil characters explain that the creature will assist you in your godly doings, and eventually mature and grow over time.

Once you complete a few quests to gain a bit of "tribute" (the currency in Black and White 2), you are set off into the story mode. The main gist of the story is to rebuild your civilization, gain allies (or conquer them) and eventually exact revenge on the Aztecs. There are several civilizations to befriend or conquer, ranging from the Nords to ancient Japan. Each civilization can take hours to complete, and there are many chances to gain tribute and buy structures that help with progression in-game. The side-quests make use of the "god" like powers, which have you doing things like tossing barrels of alcohol from island to island, or guiding a friendly spy through a dangerous forest. Your creature also grows, and can be upgraded. You can teach it different fighting styles, and damaging magic moves like fireball or thunder, or on the flip-side, you can upgrade it's gathering and building abilities. You can also purchase structures for your population that do everything from increase the birth rate, to housing the elderly.

Gameplay

The gameplay differs in many respect's from the previous game, in that you see what your beast is thinking, the usefulness of your army and also heads up display that the first game lacked, whilst the game has a HUD it is much less intrusive then other god games.

Your beast learns from your actions, if you hit it a few time's when it's trying to eat your towns-folk it will eventually stop trying.

The first game had your beast learn from repetition, whilst in this game your beast learns from you (the player) buying a power-up. Your beast learns by the way you interact with it. People have criticized that the first game was more realistic in it's approach to what is essentially a pet, the first game was more obscure in dealing with the creature