Black & White: Creature Isles Preview
We take a detailed look at the upcoming Black & White expansion.
Black & White's semi-intelligent creature, with AI that made it capable of learning and acting on its own in surprising and frustrating ways, is no doubt the game's most memorable achievement. Many fans of the game came to really care for their creatures. Besides the impressively lifelike behaviors of Black & White's creatures, their large, glassy eyes and articulate gestures made them seem even more real. It should be no surprise that the next addition to the Black & White world focuses exclusively on creatures--plural, because now in Black & White: Creature Isles there's a whole menagerie of them for you to play with and two that your creature can raise on his own.
In Creature Isles, you've landed in a very large land populated by many mature creatures, but none of them have godly masters like yours does. So the native creatures are a bit impressed with yours, and he's invited to join the Brotherhood if he can pass all the trials they've set out. But even that isn't your final goal. Mercutio, a giant crocodile who leads the Brotherhood, is the guardian of Eve, a female creature yours would certainly like to breed with if he can get the chance. But this challenge is more than just finding a mate--it represents your creature's chance to have offspring, making the life cycle go full circle as the creature you raised from infancy in the first game becomes a parent himself.
If this seems a bit touchy feely, it's not necessarily. With their British humor and directness, Lionhead puts the goal in quite blunt, vivid terms on the order of "Your creature wants sex." It will likely be treated as matter of factly as the facts of life were presented in the first game, although Peter Molyneux, Black & White's creator, does envision that the game's ending might include some graphical reenactment. One consequence of Lionhead's calling your creature's betrothed Eve is that your creature is now pretty clearly male, a previous ambiguity.
But that's just the beginning and the end of the game. During the course of your creature's quest to join the Brotherhood and impress Mercutio and Eve, he'll have to complete approximately 25 trials. Many of these trials are minigames that your creature himself must learn, but you can join in after he's got them down. One of the first trials is a bowling contest. It uses the game's capable physics engine to set up a bowling lane on one corner of an island, and your creature throws a ball at pins to compete with a smart-aleck cow. Another minigame involves shooting at targets with a ballista through a new first-person targeting view. But the funniest one we saw is the one in the Japanese tribe's cemetery that resembles whack-a-mole. Other types of trials include fights with other creatures, and these won't necessarily be easy. One creature, the Jedi Rhino, calls upon "the source" for a number of special Jedi-like powers, and he's a strong fighter to boot.
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- GameSpot Score8.0great
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Black & White: Creature Isle Video Review
Black & White was one of the most highly anticipated games of 2001. A little under a year later, the official expansion pack, Black & White: Creature Isle has hit the shelves to satiate those looking to take their creatures further. Will these new challenges be enough to keep fans happy? Greg Kasavin explains in this video review.
- Jan 22, 2002
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- EA Games
- Lionhead Studios
- Real-Time Strategy
- Release: Jan 21, 2002
- ESRB: Teen
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