Have you ever wanted to watch two groups of ants fight each other? Like, you and a friend each raise a colony of ants next to each other, influencing the environment but mostly letting the ants just do what they do, building their colony. You and your friend can each go over to the other ant colony every once in a while and just totally eff it up, just wreck it like a borrowed car, and then retreat back to your own area and continue helping the ants build, and repair any damage your opponent has done. Then, eventually, you make the ants fight each other to the death. Populous II is like that but without any of the thorny animal cruelty hangups (because seriously, ants rule and forcing super-organisms to fight each other isn’t really a good road to go down) and with god-appropriate attacks like pillars of fire, tidal waves, all-consuming fungi, and plagues. You progress through different stages, manipulating the landscape to help your little tribes of people grow, and using the mana that they give you to destroy whatever Greek god you’re opposing.
Early on, Populous II is just as cool as it sounds. You’re watching these tiny, simplistic societies grow, you’re throwing magic at a guy you hate, everything is going well. In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, it’s sort of like an RTS puzzle action arcade game. Everything’s grid-based and you have a couple little toolbars where you can activate powers or tell your tribes how to act. There’s a sense of satisfaction I can only describe as intoxicating that comes from flattening the land out for your people to live little prosperous lives upon. At one point, I was all set to give Populous II my first five-star rating. But the shine leaves it after a while.
Populous II’s basic gameplay is fun, but it’s overall difficulty curve is hopelessly flawed. Instead of asking you to play through all of its levels (of which there are just under a thousand), it jumps you somewhere between one and eight levels after each one you finish. The better you do, the more levels you skip. However, the game’s criteria for having played well has, I found, little to do with actual strategy and more to do with just spamming low-level powers over and over. This meant that my people had to deal with a lot of flowers, because that was my personal favorite low-level power. The other problem is, even when you’re good enough that you can comfortably win every match and game the system to give yourself a high score at the end, it doesn’t jump you forward enough levels to keep things even remotely fresh.
The campaign starts off charmingly easy, but it doesn’t exactly ramp up. Easy matches are interspersed with arbitrarily placed “wow this match has been going on for an hour” forced marches. And what makes the one type easy and the other difficult seems almost like an oversight on the part of the developers. A certain power exists solely to end the match when one side has a population advantage, but when it’s unavailable thanks to the level’s parameters, there’s pretty much no reliable way to end a match. That power, Armageddon, simply forces the two sides to immediately drop everything else and fight each other; it’s the introduction of the two ant colonies to one another, pitting the two populations against each other in a quick battle of numbers. As far as I can tell, the only available win condition is the obliteration of the other team, so it would make sense to have Armageddon be available all the time, right? It does to me, at least, but the people who made Populous II saw things differently. Maybe they thought it would be fun to try and hit buildings with unpredictable pillars of fire that don’t even go where you put them all the time and follow few apparent movement rules. I guess that’s their choice to make, but after dealing with my sixth or seventh Armageddon-less match, I uninstalled Populous II, confident that I’ll not want to play it for some time.
I’ve never played the original Populous, but from what I can tell the biggest changes between the two is that they added a bunch of powers and shifted from generic gods to the Greek pantheon. Instead of either of those changes, I think Populous II would be a more appealing package if they deepened the society building aspect. Basically what I’m looking for is the complex simulation of a Civilization game mixed with the approachable arcadiness and visceral satisfaction that Populous II handles so well. For all their cute animations, the tribes don’t act like real groups of people at all. Why aren’t they producing literary works about me and constructing temples and experiencing schisms? I AM THEIR GOD.
All said, Populous II is a significantly flawed gem. It has a core of fascinating, terrific design surrounded by utterly puzzling decisions. With a little more polish, this could be a much better game. With a completely different focus wrapped around the same core, this would be one of the all-time classics. Instead of either of those, it’s just fun for a while and then frustrating. It’s one of those experiences where you can see something cool in the distance but you can never quite get close enough to touch it. Three stars.