Populous: The Beginning

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Review: Populous: The Beginning

At least, it's not Populous as I came to know it over two games and two data disks in the early '90s. It's more like PowerMonger, a lesser-known 1990 Bullfrog classic that could reasonably lay claim to the "first real-time strategy" title so often bestowed on Dune 2.

Now, Beginning is not a bad game. In fact, it's a quite a good one. But it's a different game-one without a quintessential quality that defined Populous.

Peter Molyneux's Populous games were based on the concept of influence rather than direct control-of shaping the world to excite your little men into action. PowerMonger and the new Populous, are closer to mainstream real-time strategy games. Here, you're in direct control of a spell-casting shaman and her minions and, plunked down on 25 disparate 3D worlds (delightfully round, a charming innovation), you must make them your own.

Invariably, this will require building or expanding a settlement: houses to augment the number of followers, watchtowers to expand the shaman's spell-firing range; training buildings to turn your people into warriors; and temples to make them into preachers. Eventually, you'll have to go after an enemy shaman, her followers, her buildings-if she doesn't come after you first.

It's in war that the PowerMonger in Populous bubbles to the surface: The tiny men locked in great, chaotic battles, with faded souls drifting from earthly remains into the sky. (You'll also see it in places like the importance of rotation and the look of the little bundles of wood on the ground.)

But this is also where I started to like the new Populous for its own sake. It's funny and it's sweet. The preachers, holding their text in one hand while gesturing with the other, can convert enemies, whose hands will drop to their sides before they sit around cross-legged listening to the sermon. When the shaman's around, the little men fall all over themselves to bow down before her. When buildings are attacked, they rock back and forth as if in a cartoon.

The result is that Populous never feels sour. Even when you lose, you have a good time, and that's just like the original game.

As you may have gathered, worship also plays a significant part. The islands are dotted with stone heads and totem poles, and you often won't know what worshipping here will do until you try. It may create a land bridge. It may earn your shaman one of the 26 spells. (Yup, it's got a touch of Magic Carpet in it as well.) It may even earn a boon from the Gods.

There's always a risk when using such devices that the game will turn into a series of puzzle pieces. But that didn't happen in the scenarios I played. The missions are well-balanced and open enough in structure that you'll find solutions in more than one direction and remain active and interested even when you feel stuck.

And that I was throughout. The only other problems I had were technical. The game kept locking up without warning. This appears to be an issue with my Voodoo II-based Obsidian2 accelerator card. Once I switched to a RIVA TNT-based Viper 550, the colors seemed a little rougher, but the problem went away.

That's a good thing: It allowed me to finish this review. I'm still playing, and still having a good time.

But in my mind, I'm not playing Populous. I'm playing PowerMonger.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro