Populous

One of a kind. Not for the faint of heart.

User Rating: 6.7 | Populous GEN

By DroidSmuggler | Review Date: August 14, 2007

Populous for the Sega Genesis is easily one of the most memorable games I've ever played, and I never actually spent all that much time with it. The main reason? This game is hard. Not inaccessible. Just very challenging, at least in the later stages. But it can also be fun if you're willing to spend a little time with it. This goes double for a game that was ported from the PC to a console. At first it seems like there's a lot going on, but that's mostly due to the very unique (although creative) interface this game employs. Once you figure out some of the basics like levelling out the land and setting up buildings everything else sort of falls into place over time. In no time you'll have your hapless little villagers scurrying around, populating the land, and generally doing your bidding, in other words trying to eliminate the other civilization on the board. The game employs several fun play mechanics with which to pull this off, such as earthquakes, floods, and the more popular volcanic erruptions. Of course don't forget the Knights who will venture out to pilage your opponents land, or more pointedly, burn it to the ground. As I said, this is all quite fun at first, but once you get into some of the later levels the game starts to become Very Challenging. Really, this is one of those games where only the truly determined will manage to fight their way to the end. And I do mean Determined. Because if you're not willing to be persistent in your quest for victory this game WILL defeat you.

I remember my friend and I playing in the mode where you change the environment to something like a cartoon, where instead of people you have a population of little mice creatures. And instead of volcanic lava you had boiling caramel. Tasty...but kinda bizarre. We actually had more fun playing against each other and in typical fashion I usually lost...but not before taking some of his unwitting mice down with me into the depths of candy goo.