Populous DS

Review from Anna - Wednesday, 29 July 2009 @ 2:49pm

It's weird when you start playing a game that you can see everything wrong with it but somehow you keep playing. You hate yourself for it, you know it's bad like that drink that goes around where you don't know what's in it and frankly, you don't want to know, you keep going for the kudos.

I think I lost the game in my analogy there...

In any case, a little bit of digging I found the original Populous was one of the early games made by Peter Molyneux, who we all know loves a good god-sim. Populous is considered one of the earlier varieties of this genre and now it's been brought to the DS by Genki. Comparing the two I can now see why I found a few designs in the DS game more than a little simplistic and annoying. It was first released in 1989 and they've remained quite constant to the original.

Minions, I command you!

Populous has you in the place of a Deity – one of Earth, Fire, Water, Wind or Harvest – who controls your tribe on Earth. The strength of your tribe determines how much of the area you control and whether you'll come out on top when Armageddon is called. Your little people float across the landscape and, when in Build mode, will build a settlement where ever they find flat land. Your key tool is landscaping, so making the entire area as flat as you can lets your cities expand and your people found more settlements. Early in the game you might find your people a little too eager so if they decide the best place to live is on top of the mountain, evicting them is the way to go to get them realising their mistake. Let them wander too long, however, and they die in the wilderness with no place to call home ::sadface::

The landscaping tool is the most basic but build up your tribe (and in doing so, the number of people worshipping you) and you start earning belief points. The more faith your people have in you, the more power you control. Depending on what type of Deity you are, this gives you the power to hurl fireballs at enemy villagers, drown them, send a meteor down into their largest city... but of course it works both ways so it gets to a point where both sides have large populations and are just throwing their powers at one another and quickly fixing whatever trail of destruction the other has left.

Your people have limited power in this struggle between deities and demons. But you can send them out to attack your opponent which seems to just be a bitch-slap fest with repetitive sound bites to make it interesting. If they win, you gain control of the city, if they were fighting in the city, or you just kill the enemy if on neutral soil. You can strengthen your people by unifying them and you also have the option of calling forth a Warrior if you have high enough belief.

Make it flat and they will come

To avoid a perpetual slinging match, they have timed games for you. Depending on the settings for the game, eventually you will be forced into an Armageddon if you haven't chosen to call one already through the belief powers you have amassed. Calling Armageddon is only suitable if you definitely have the upper hand as noted in the top left hand corner of your screen. If your colour is looking a little poorly, it might be a good idea to hold off a bit.

Armageddon calls everyone on the map to the screen you were looking at and there is a bitch-slap orgy for a few minutes until there's only one tribe left standing. Each type of Deity has it's own theme song that their tribe marches to when they come to Armageddon and I guarantee you will be sick of hearing the same few bars of music repeated after only a couple off games. Especially if it's a big game and Armageddon goes for several minutes where all you can do is WATCH THEM. Bah.

It's the end of the world as they know it.

That's the game in a nutshell for you so if you'd prefer to play the abandonware version you wouldn't be missing much. You make sure they build in the right spots and keep the land flat, you throw miracles around when enough of them believe in you and then when Armageddon is called you wait till they finish slapping each other to see who wins.

The presentation of the game isn't fantastic, even for a DS game. Top screen is fine but the touch screen is just weird blocks that show you the landscape (green for land, blue for water) and floating blue pins show where your people are wandering around. The music is bearable at best and irritating at worst. Nothing really recommends this game except that gamer's need to get to the next level and keep going until it's done. I'd get that caught up in it that I'd forget the annoyances I've previously pointed out, the simplistic nature of the game, the dodgy graphics and the bitch-slap effects but it'ss from that era where going to the next level meant something more. Possibly. I don't know what it is. I'm going to try and pin it down on that but I don't think it's working.

Playing this game wasn't a chore when I was playing it, but looking up to find a couple of hours gone was. When all you've been doing it forcing little people to build houses on the flat bit and throwing a couple of unnatural disasters your enemy's way, you don't get a whole heap of satisfaction out of that. My feelings on this game are conflicting and confused like a puppy that has the option of going home with a better, less dysfunctional family but knows it definitely gets fed by Timmy's mum every night even if little Timmy does pull on it's tail.

My analogies are never going to work.

Pros

Lightly addictive gameplay.
Historical importance in the history of the gaming industry.
Good as an entry into the god-sim genre.

Cons

Dated.
Simplistic.
Dodgy graphics.
There's nothing to do when in Armagedon mode which means sitting around for a quite a while listening to annoying sound bites of a bitch-slap orgy. Never a good thing.

Summary

Populous does the job, but it's dated and a little bit overly simplistic in it's execution. It's a beginner's god-sim and if you can't (for some odd reason) get your hands on the old DOS version from 20 years ago, it's not bad for a history lesson to see where Molyneux and Bullfrog originated from.