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Creature Isle Review February 26, 2002 Terence Wong |
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Summary: Does the expansion to Black & White do anything to improve upon the disappointing original? Terence investigates for us.
 Game Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
Here we go again
Firingsquad went out on a limb when we reviewed the original Black & White. We were one of the first reviews to give the game a bad score. While the vast majority of the gaming press thought that Black & White was the second coming of Christ, we didn’t appreciate the repetitive gameplay and lack of depth. We were expecting a lot of flames, and we sure got them. But that’s not all we got – out of the hundreds of e-mails and comments there were actually more readers that agreed with the review than not.
So along comes Creature Isle, the expansion pack to Black & White. I’m sure a lot of you are expecting us to slam this game outright, but that wouldn’t be fair. You can’t judge an expansion pack or a sequel based on the original. In fact, I always hope a game that I play is good before I play it. Who wants trudge through a bad game? You don’t go to a movie theatre and pay ten bucks and wish the movie sucks. An open mind is the best asset you can have before you play a game.
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What’s expanded?
Remember the singing pilgrims from the original Black & White? Well, those happy bastards made it, and they ended up landing on an island with no gods and a secret society of avatar creatures. No gods means you are the first and only god that the natives have heard about. No other gods means you have complete power over the island and no annoying neighbors.
Shortly after you arrive, you’re greeted by a giant Lion creature named Rufus (too bad he’s nothing like Chris Rock in Dogma). He explains that the island is inhabited by creatures who have learned to survive without gods. They’ve also given themselves a snappy title: The Brotherhood.
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Rufus offers to let your creature into the Brotherhood, but he must first pass a series of trials. Why exactly you would want to give up your creature I don’t know, but apparently you do. I’m also not sure why the Brotherhood isn’t threatened by your presence since they’re obviously hiding from gods by living on an island without any. But the long and short of it is everything is lovey-dovey and your creature wants to wear a new shiny bracelet.
SIDEBAR: Minimum
350Mhz CPU
64 MB RAM
500MB hard disk space
8MB D3D compatible video card
FS Recommends
1.0 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
GeForce2 or better
| Graphics, Sound, and Interface | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
It looks like a duck
Creature Isle is just an expansion pack, so there are very few changes to the graphics engine. Black & White doesn’t really need any changes to its graphics though – it’s still the best looking Sim game out right now. The tessellation engine scales the number of polygons in a model to allow you to zoom in to see a villagers face, or zoom out to see the entire island. The textures scale so the closer you are the more detailed the textures get. You can read the original Black & White review if you want more details.
It sounds like a duck
Sound effects and music are also unchanged in Creature Isle. Again like the graphics, this is a good call on Lionhead’s part. The original Black & White has some of the best voice acting in a game to date. Creature Isle has much less voice acting, but the quality is still very high. The same great sense of humor is also still present.
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There are some peculiarities with the voices of the creatures. For instance, all of the creatures in The Brotherhood can talk, but your creature can’t. It’s disheartening to know that your creature is a few steps down the evolutionary ladder from the rest of the creatures on the island. It would be a lot easier to train your creature if you could say, “Don’t take a dump on the villagers!” rather than smacking the crap out of it when it does. It’s interesting and somewhat funny that this game encourages corporal punishment.
Also, all of the creatures on the island have some sort of accent. Granted, most of the voices in the original have British accents, giving them a certain charm that only uppity Brits can have. In Creature Isle the creatures go global with accents from everywhere. I’d almost say some of them are borderline racist, except that the animal’s accent has nothing to do with where it’s from (and it’s a 40 foot tall talking animal). The monkeys sound like they’re straight out of Fat Albert though – I was waiting for them to offer me some Jell-O.
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It feels like a duck
Creature Isle also keeps the “Hand of God” interface from the original. Everything you need to do in the game is done through a hand – no menus, buttons, or lists to mess with. Need to move a tree? Just pick it up and throw it. To cast a miracle, just wave the hand around in patterns and you can conjure up a flock of birds, a pile of wood, or a bolt of lightning.
I never liked the interface in Black & White, and after playing Creature Isle, I still don’t. The overriding factor is the inaccuracy of the hand. If you’re zoomed out, it’s really hard to pick up or point at an object in a group. You can zoom in right next to the object you’re trying to grab, but you have to zoom in so far to be accurate that it’s a waste of time. I wish I could play this game more like an RTS – zoomed out to a reasonable distance and able to easily click on anything on the screen. This inaccuracy kills any enjoyment in some of the trials which are dependent on it.
SIDEBAR: The marbles trial can be very difficult since people don’t play marbles much. You can beat the computer two ways. 1) Land all of your marbles in the middle and hope he misses one. Aim for the outside of the second circle and the marbles should stop in the middle. Your creature throws at an angle, so you have to aim off to the right. 2) Knock the computer’s marbles out of the middle by aiming close to the center.
| Gameplay | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
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.
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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.
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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.
SIDEBAR: Apparently the Brotherhood has nothing against letting cheaters into their ranks. You should cheat as much as you can to finish the trials. Rufus’s trial is one of the easiest, if you forget about the rules.
| More Gameplay | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
It’s not a duck, it’s a chicken
One big selling point of Creature Isle is that your creature can have its own creature named Tyke. Your creature takes care of Tyke just like you take care of your creature. He’ll teach Tyke miracles, and how to treat villagers. Your creature will reflect whatever you teach it – if you want Tyke to be benevolent to the villagers then your creature needs to be good too. You can’t directly interact with Tyke, only your creature can.
Tyke is another feature in Creature Isle that I just don’t understand the appeal of. There’s a small factor of, “cool my creature has a pet,” but beyond that, Tyke is useless. There are no villages you need to fight over, so Tyke doesn’t help you with that. He can’t fight other creatures. He does help the villagers, but you don’t need two creatures to do that. What is his purpose? You can’t even eat him if your creature is hungry.
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Tyke can actually get in the way of your creature during trials. In one trial your creature needs to destroy some buildings. He’ll cast miracles, throw rocks, or stomp on the buildings. The first time I tried this, my creature cast fireballs to destroy some of the buildings. Tyke sees a burning building and thinks that he needs to save it, so he casts water and douses the fire, causing my creature to lose the trial. Since you can’t interact with Tyke, you can’t tell him to not interfere with the trials, and that concept is way out of reach for your creature to teach to him. The only thing you can do is stick him in the “Tyke Daycare” or what I like to call it, “Get the Hell Out of the Way You KFC Reject”.
Temptation Island
Another lauded feature of Creature Isle is the ability for your creature to fall in love with another creature. Unfortunately, you don’t teach your creature how to pick up chicks at a bar. There’s no “best pick-up line” trial. There are not even any female creatures wandering about the island to hit on. I won’t spoil the game completely, but the love aspect is barely there. Of course, I’m not sure if this is such a bad thing, because hot animal nookie isn’t something I really need to see in a game.
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Finally, Creature Isle is very short. It contains less than 10 hours of actual gameplay, or around 20 if you need to spend a lot of time training a new creature. There’s only one island (the original had five), no conflicts, and a very thin storyline. Twenty hours is the average length of an expansion pack that sells for $20-30, but given the nature of the childish mini-games, it’s hard to say Creature Isle is long enough.
SIDEBAR: The bear’s trial is much easier than it looks, if you think outside the box. Just think Star Trek…
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
Good graphics: Easily the best looking Sim game out.
More of what you want: Lionhead took gamers’ suggestions and made Creature Isle all about the Creatures.
Superb sound and voice acting: Just like the original, Creature Isle has great sound, voice acting, and a sense of humor.
Creature’s creature: Your creature can have a creature of its own. Tyke is a chicken you raise from a little chick to the biggest cock you’ve ever seen.
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Cons
Terrible trials: The trials in Creature Isle are a series of childish, frustrating, and droll puzzles any five year old could figure out. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to the game.
Same interface and physics: The inaccurate pointer and sloppy physics from the original are back. It wouldn’t be so bad except the game is completely centered around these aspects.
Little gamplay: Since there’s nothing else to do on the island but the trials and puzzles, the game should only take you 10 hours or less to complete.
New features fall short:The new miracles are forgettable, and the chance to “Find love for your creature” is worthless.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |