Black & White 2 is, like Caesar III, a game I have played a lot in my childhood, by virtue of... actually owning it. Unlike Caesar III however I have pretty much forgotten about it for the past ten years, and it's only recently that, in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to download it again. Was it as good as I remembered? Does it still hold up in 2023?
Well ok sorry first of all I NEED to complain about how stupidly hard it is to get my hands on this game again. This has nothing to do with the actual review of the game I'm just bitching, you can skip the following paragraph if you don't care.
The thing about BW2 is that the dev company sunk into the sea never to be seen again, meaning it doesn't exist on steam or gogg or any e-version at all. Which, fair, there are a bunch of games like this, love me some abandonware. But BW2 comes that very specific era where companies were trying sooo hard to make their games unpirateable (which lead to shit like Dark Spore, a game that can only be played when connected to the EA servers, which no longer exist) so finding a rom of the game isn't enough you need like three different patches to make it work on your computer. This is ridiculous I just want to check if my childhood game was good man.
Anyways. The game opens up with a pretty good tutorial on the different mechanics. You learn what you, personally, can do (throw shit at people and move things around, mostly) as well as the disciple system: basically, humans will usually take care of their needs on their own, but you can designate some lads to do some specific jobs to ensure that you don't run out of ressources.
After that, a bit more in-depth tutorial level on the actual management part of the game. You learn how to build shit, how to take care of your people, how to conquer cities by either impressing them (hoard enough prestige and they'll want to join you) or by throwing an army at them. There are also a bunch of sidequests to teach you some extra stuff, and that's cool! I hate it when tutorials are just a bunch of exposition, even the flimtihest stupidest excuse of a plot will do to keep my attention. There are a couple more mechanics you will have to learn later (most notably how to cast miracles, because you ARE a god,) but you can learn most of them in these two first quests. It's really cool. I can NOT emphasize enough how shitty tutorials in management games can be. I love playing and having fun from the moment I boot on my game.
Past that, you have six maps of conquering lads. They're fairly diverse; you've got some where the enemy will attack you relentlessly, some where they play pacifist and try to impress your lads into joining, ect ect. It's not a hard game, the AI is kinda old and it shows. It's really easy to trick it into doing what you want, whether your goal is to obliterate it with your soldiers or just defending your city so you can focus on making everyone happy. I find the game a bit short personally- there are three type of enemy nations in this game (scandinavian, japanese and aztec) and the aztecs only have two maps to their names, which include the last map which I have only been able to clear up by charging full throttle within the first five minutes before they could gather forces, so not much time to enjoy the 3d art.
These maps have some small sidequests, which are really hit or miss for me. Sir I am playing a management game I don't want to lead some guy out of a labyrinth. But hey kudos for trying it was a respectable attempt. In general the writing of this game is pretty funny, they did a good job on that.
Other than the main campaign... welln there is nothing else. Which is a shame, I think there's some cool potential in some sandbox-like scenario. Hell, just let me freely select which campaign map i want and which civ I want to play, that'd already be enough for me. I wanna play scandinavian or aztec or japanese damn it!! I want my buildings to look cool!!
So yeah, tl;dr: it's still a pretty fun game and it's worth checking out imo, but man it would be so cool to see it made for modern-day comps. Fucking imagine. Fucking imagine this game with an AI that is 10% better and a couple more mechanics learned from the two decades of games we just lived through. It would own! It would own massively! I know it won't happen but fuck man if Dungeon Keeper can get remasters in the 20s then this one can too!! I believe it!!