The creator of Populous is back at his old tricks again. Peter Molyneux and his Lionhead Studios have been hard at work on this latest "god sim" for the past three years, and their efforts are finally realized as Black & White is on shelves.

Cast in the role of a newbie god, you must guide your followers through a series of lands, each with its own opposing god(s) to dethrone.

As a god, your main objective is to keep the peoples belief in you at a high level. You accomplish this by impressing them with your presence. Simple acts like picking up trees and throwing them through the village will gain you belief, but really magnificent feats like healing the sick or creating a forest of trees on barren ground will garner lots of faith. These miracles are performed by using prayer power, which you get from people worshiping you at the temple, which acts as your symbol in the land.

Likewise, you have a creature, sort of a virtual pet, which acts as your avatar among the people. The creature is the physical embodiment of your godliness, and you must train him to carry out the acts that you see fit.

Black & White gets its name from the open-ended nature of the game. For each problem, there are usually several solutions, some of which are inherently good, while some are inherently evil. For example, early in the game, you are asked by a villager to rescue her sick brother, who has wandered away and gotten lost. In return for performing this deed, she promises you give you a gate stone, which you need to complete a quest, and which is in her house. As a kind and benevolent god, you can search out the brother and return him to her. If you want to seem stern, yet kind, you can smash open her house, take the gate stone, and then go and retrieve the sickly brother. As an evil diety, your options are diverse and sadistic. You can pluck the brother up and cast him into the sea. Further, you could then return his skeletal remains to the sister. Even worse, you can destroy the sister’s home, kill her and then deliver her body to the brother, who will die of shock. No matter how you play it, you’ll still be able to get the item you need to continue your quest.

This dichotomy between good and evil is what makes playing Black & White fun. It’s fun to be a god, to have power over the masses and to treat them as you see fit. They’ll believe in you either way, whether you lead through love or through hate.

Unfortunately, you’ll grow to hate the people in short order, due to their seemingly incomprehensible lack of knowledge about anything. This is where your list of decidedly un-godlike duties comes into play. You’ll be forced to carry out such mundane tasks as telling your people where to build their housing and other structures, assigning them to breed, and keeping worshipers at the temple supplied with food. It’s ludicrous that you should have to do these things, especially when some of them require several steps (building a house, for example, requires you to deposit wood at the workshop, then pick up the resultant scaffolding and set it down where you want your people to erect a house. Why can’t the people decide what and where to build for themselves? Why won’t they take wood to the workshop on their own? Why, for the love of me, won’t they even get freaky and have children without me telling them to?!? And for the love of all that is good in the world, why don’t my worshippers have the common sense to feed themselves, or at least get another villager to keep them supplied with food?

Maybe I’m being overly picky, but I was expecting an experience more on par with Populous, while Black & White seems to be equal parts Populous and Sim City. The "playing god" parts of the game (winning influence over new villages, performing miracles and teaching your creature to carry out your will) are a lot of fun. The other stuff, which unfortunately seems to be about 70% of the game, is not. Hopefully, Lionhead will remedy a few of the more glaring problems via patches (I’d like to be able to assign villagers to do a lot of the maintenance chores and building duties, for example).

In the end (or maybe that should be beginning?), Black & White offers a unique gameplay experience, which is perhaps marred by overdone micromanagement features, but which is compelling nonetheless and deserves to be given a try by any open minded gamer willing to play god for awhile.