Gameplay

In the original Black & White, the gameplay centered on defeating gods by converting all of their worshippers. Your creature was your avatar, taking care of your villagers and evangelizing yourself to others. A lot of people (including myself) complained that the gameplay was repetitive, and the creature was way more interesting than the conflict. Lionhead took this to heart and created Creature Isle with this in mind. There’s no gods to fight, the villages convert at the drop of a hat, and you only fight other creatures when you choose. The game is all about training your creature and completing a series of small games called “Trials”.

The trials in Creature Isle are either very easy, or incredibly frustrating. Before the turtle race you’re told that you only need to pass through the gates; you don’t need to run the entire course. You can actually cut out half of the course – there’s no way you can lose since the turtle goes around the entire track. A few of the trials are no-brainers like this, but the majority of them will drive you towards the edge of insanity.

Forest miracle

One-two punch

His Kung-Fu is strong

Interface woes

The frustrating trials have a lot of bad things going on for them. First, the interface isn’t accurate enough for the precise trials. Take the soccer trial for example. You need to guide your creature to kick a soccer ball through a series of checkpoints. It’s fairly simple, but the pointer misses a lot. If you click on the soccer ball to have your creature kick it, sometimes he’ll kick it, and sometimes he’ll stare at it like dumbass because the game didn’t register the click. You also have to position your creature since he can only kick straight, which suffers from the same lack of accuracy. Basically, you spend half the time clicking around to get your creature in the right position, and the other half clicking a million times on the ball so he kicks it. So you can see it’s not that the trial itself is frustrating, but rather the poor interface that makes it frustrating.

Other trials depend on the game’s physics. In the bowling trial, you have to throw a marker in the direction you want your creature to throw the bowling ball. You can’t do any fancy shots, so you have to throw the marker straight down the lane. I really didn’t like this because throwing objects in a straight line in Black & White is damn near impossible. Try it yourself – open up a paint program and try to draw a vertical line freehand with a mouse. Fun? Didn’t think so.

Beating down an ogre

Midget giants

They’re actually building

Clickfest

Another gripe I have about the trials is that they don’t depend on how well you train your creature. When Rufus explains that the creature needs to pass a series of trials to get into the Brotherhood, I got the impression that it’s up to my creature’s skills to pass the tests. Therefore I would need to teach the creature miracles, let him grow, and make him strong. Man was I wrong. All of the tests center around how well you can order your creature around – they have nothing to do with how well you’ve taught him. All of them center around how well you can click around the screen. For example, giant chasing test – your creature scares away giants by standing in front of them. You tell the creature where to go, nothing else happens. It has nothing to do with how strong your creature is, if he’ll try to cheat if he’s evil, or how scared the giants are depending on your creature’s size.

Lionhead should bill themselves as an educational software company, because the trials in Creature Isle look like they’re taken from a 3rd grade kid’s game. One of the most enduring aspects of PC games is that you can make games that are more complex and require more thought than the average console game. The PC audience is generally more sophisticated and drawn to thought-provoking games. In Creature Isle you get to shoot the dolphins with a bubble cannon. That’s right, a bubble cannon. I kept wondering if this was some sort of inside joke that I wasn’t getting, but as I completed more trials I found that they’re all just as dumb. You’ll find more mentally challenging games at a daycare.