Black & White

The Good
Training the animal and watching it interact with your populace can be fun.

The attractive graphics and ability to heavily zoom in (until single people fill the screen) and out (where single people are even rendered any more, being smaller than a pixel in size).

The idea of playing good and/or evil.

Some of the sub-quests are quite innovative.

The Bad
The animal is generally very dumb. There are a preset collection of things it can learn to do (well, or badly), but some of the essentials are just beyond its grasp (such as taking food up to the worshippers at your temple so they don't all starve to death).

The control method can be a nightmare with too many things to do and no smooth way of doing them, either using mouse or keyboard.

The camera is very clumsy. You go to a village in a valley and set the camera height a useful distance above ground level. Heading off elsewhere you either have to bother about with the cumbersome zoom out/zoom in functions, or watch as you camera smacks into, and drags itself up the face of a cliff, giving you a nice view of massive blurred pixels. Would setting height above landscape been so hard to implement?

The idea of casting spells through gestures: You draw certain shapes on the landscape to select one of your spells for use - unfortunately, like a badly implemented handwriting-recognition-system, the game very easily ignores you or selects the wrong spell, unless you time your drawing perfectly (and hope your machine doesn't start to chug at that very moment).

Saves later on it the game take way too long, and the actual playing on certain levels once things gets hectic really chews away at your processor and hard drive, making the game chug terribly, even on high end machines.

Lack of professions for the humans: The people in the game need food and wood to survive. There's a forester (that cuts down trees), but no profession that attempts to replace these trees. There's a fisherman and farmer, but no herder for the tons of roaming livestock, leaving you or your creature the task of collecting food within easy site and reach of the 'starving' populace.

Lack of information about opponents: You can be going ahead watering crops for some villagers to eat and the first thing you hear about one of your other villages getting burnt to the ground is some quiet whispering 'deeeeeath...' noises in the background. No major alerts pop up. This can be frustrating seeing as so much time is needed spent doing micromanagement stuff.

MAJOR GRIPE: The Auto-save is a very handy feature, but it does take a while (sometimes up to 30 seconds). Now, this isn't the point I have a problem with, and I really like having it on (mainly due to the frequency of crashes at the moment). However, if you happen to be doing something at the moment the auto-save takes place, once the save finishes the game assumes you have continued doing that one thing for all the time it took to save the game (i.e. 30 seconds' worth of holding down a key/mouse button). Doesn't sound too much of a problem, but I've had several occasions where, early on in a level, whilst innocently scrolling around my little part of the landscape, the game auto-saves, then when it comes back I find myself at the other end of the map with the opponent gods roaring at me for entering their territory, quickly proceeded by all my villages getting lightning storms smashing them to bits before I was even in a state to offer any resistance. Gah! I HATE that.

The Bottom Line
Well, it's a fun game for a time. Personally, I'm getting fed up with it due to camera/control problems, plus random crashes, and am glad I got it as a birthday present, and didn't pay out for it. However, if you liked Populous and want to spend some time watching how some people tried to code up a learning animal, either buy one of the Populous games and a copy of Creatures, or wait until this title has dropped a little in price and check it out.