Fans of real-time strategy games that focus on building and developing a culture will find Black & White shallow and imprecise, while fans of real-time strategy games that focus on action and combat will find Black & White slow and tedious.
Of course, difficult controls and sluggish rate of progression means that it's also easy to either accidentally do bad or too tiresome to resort to good.īlack & White is more a novel curiosity to be revisited than a genuinely good game. The moral quandaries posed by Black & White are often the cartoonish type you get with any games with hamfisted morality systems, where the choice is to be an angelic paragon or a mustache-twirling villain. Plus several unfinished or poorly implemented aspects of its AI can prove a source of constant frustration (such as a creature complaining repeatedly about thirst-there's no way to force the creature to drink, and water is not a resource you can manipulate or provide). The difficulty in effectively teaching the creature to behave in a useful manner is one of the most frequently criticized aspects Black & White. One of the key features touted in Black & White is your “creature”-an animal with a learning AI that allows you to teach it by showing it things, rewarding “good” behavior and punishing undesired behavior.
Your “influence” grows very slowly as you perform miracles and impress your followers by dumping food and raw materials on them eventually, you are able to interact with neighboring villages to win hearts and minds or destroy them utterly. While you take on the role of a god of a primitive people, you cannot act as a gentle shepherd in your divine role-to put it simply, your followers are brick-dumb and useless, and they cannot do or accomplish anything, even having kids, without the literal hand of God intervening.īlack & White's tutorial may be useful, but it is also quite lengthy-an indicator of the snail's pace at which the game moves. It was one of the most anticipated games of the genre and highly praised for its originality and concepts upon release, however many have re-evaluated Black & White since the glow of its initial hype faded and found it over-ambitious and highly flawed, likely to leave a mixed impression.
Black & White is a “god” game in the tradition of Populous, one that hoped to revolutionize the genre through complex learning AI and an exploration of good and evil and how they relate to a divine being.
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