Lets you be a God who can build a civilization and destroy his enemies with earthquakes,volcanoes,floods.
Leaders are people who carry and ankh and they call other people to fuse with him(making them a single person and become stronger)and each civilisation only has 1 leader and when you create a knight,the strength of your knight will depend on the strength of your leader.
To beat the opposing god,you'll need to kill all of it's people.Allowing your people to have enough flat land to build castles is the quickest way to increase your mana,and everytime you inflict a disaster or create a knight,you will use up mana and will have to wait for it to increase.
The game has nearly 500 worlds,but you can skip worlds depending on your score.Each world has an opposing god and civlisation.The types of disasters the opposing god can use differs for each world.On some worlds,opposing gods build very slowly,but on some other worlds they will build very quickly(which means they will hit you with disasters and knights more often).
To win,there is a number of strategies you can use.You can just use knights to kill all of the opposing god's people.In some worlds you cannot build knights but you can send your people onto the opposing god's land and have your people attack his people and steal their castles,homes,land etc.You can use a flood to drown all of or most of his people,but if you want to use a flood,you'll want to put your people on higher land so they don't drown too(building higher land also costs mana).
To make the game playable,you can only build land when you have at least one person or home from your civilisation on the screen.On some of the earlier worlds,you can build land over the top of enemy buildings to destroy them or you can remove the land that enemy people are standing on to drown them.In the later worlds,you can only build over water and not over land(unless a home is on the screen).
Also,in the later worlds,the people don't drown if they fall into water/lava.
The disasters are not as bad as they sound,and most of them are used to slow down the opposing civilization and not necesarily kill them.Earthquakes damage land and destroy/damage buildings and they might drown the occasional person.Volcanoes just create a giant mountain with lots of giant rocks to destroy buildings and are time consuming to negate.Rocks make land less spacious for building structures,and to remove rocks you'll need to sink them in the sea.Swamps and floods are the 2 natural disasters that are designed to kill people(swamps,which is more like quicksand is handy for killing opposition leaders before they are turned into knights and knights can see swamps but leaders and normal people cannot).
Armageddon is another disaster which orders everyone in the world from both yours and the opposition god's civilsation to figh to the last and requires an enormous amount of mana(and it will provide the people with land building ability to cross water).
When you give your people orders to build buildings(for mana)or to fuse with other people,you click on a certain icon and your people can only do one but not both at the same time.Your people also reproduce when they are inside homes/castles for a while.
The worlds are either made out of green grassy plains with beautiful blue water,desert terrain with cactus and palm trees and snowy worlds where you'll see ice on the buildings and on the trees and lots of dead trees and volcanic worlds filled with lava sea and rocky terrain.I think Populous was a great looking game for it's time.
Each person in the worlds look the same,but your people wore blue to represent good,and the CPU's people wore red to represent evil.
Your people use a cross to represent their ankh and the opposing(evil)gods used a demonic skull.
After you were victorious in a world,you will see an hooded-demonic looking entity congratulating you in a creepy voice and he refers to you as a mortal at the beginning but as you conquer more worlds he would started calling you immortal,mortal God,greater being,deity etc and after you win the final world he will refer to yoou as everything at once.
The music was great,it has a chilling sound and I wasn't sure whether it was the voice of an angry God,or chanting,or just the wind.It was always the same for every world but it never got boring and it gave the game a darker feel.
And you always heard a heartbeat and the heart beat would speed up when you got closer you got to losing or slow down if your were winning.
You would hear settlements burning down when they were on fire(after a Knight burned it down)and all the natural disasters had good sound effects.Even when a Knight was created you heard a warning sound.When Knights and people fought eachother you would hear weapons clanging together.
You can also create your own maps/worlds where you can set your own rules for you and the opposing God,and you can be the evil God in custom mode too.
The game also has some sneaky hidden features too such as occasionally these monsters will walk through the map in a straight line,and the monster will eat any person and destroy any building in it's path,and some monsters will transform any person or building it touches into a tree or cactus.Even your knights cannot defeat those creatures(they will kill your knights instantly).
Overall,it was a great and unique game for it's time.