Looking back at the flawed but ambitious Black & White 2.
This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 386 in July 2023, as part of our Reinstall series. Every month we load up a beloved classic—and find out whether it holds up to our modern gaming sensibilities.
Lodging an astronomically high score in PC Gamer magazine of 94 per cent, reviewer Tim Stone concluded that the game was “overflowing with great ideas and novel devices” and that “B&W is indeed divine entertainment”. To this day Black & White holds a Metacritic score of 90%, with the game receiving ‘Universal Acclaim’ from reviewers.Enter Black & White 2. So, how do you build on that universal acclaim? This is what Molyneux said in an interview while the game was in development. “I know we’re going to get our heads... just...
The biggest problem, as highlighted by many reviews at the time, is that while Black & White 2 offers an almost staggering amount of genre systems and ideas, individually they’re just not executed as well, or with anywhere near as much depth, as the genres they’re combining. The game was outbuilt by dedicated civ building games like SimCity and also out manoeuvred by full-fat RTS games like Rome: Total War, and not just by a bit, but by a lot. The additions were skin deep.
Today, triple-A games don’t deliver anywhere near the creative risks and experimentation that B&W 2 took, and for all his well-documented over promising faults, you’ve got to tip your hat to Molyneux here for attempting such a radical game.
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