Anyone who played the original: Get this game!

The graphics are a huge improvement, and the music is every bit as amazing as the originals was. Ai is also amazing.

Tutorials cover the first 3 lands, but you'll get past lands 1 and 2 easily enough (especially land 2). Land 3 you can go fast or take your time (like any of the lands I guess). There are many objectives on each land, but you can pick and choose what you do. Doing objectives earn you 'Tribute' that lets you buy new buildings, units and creature skills. So many people may want to do them all. But some are good, some are evil.

You can build up huge, beautiful cities and win the land by basically getting everyone to immigrate to your city, or you can make a huge army and send them into battle to smash your opponents. And of course you have your creature. Training him is a lot easier this time, and they look so amazing. I get the feeling the AI is smarter than us though, and as such the training is dumbed down to the point that it feels restrictive slightly. But I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Controls are basically the same as the original. Mainly mouse work (starts out the opposite way to BnW but you can swap it back round to 'normal' mode). You can also use keyboard shortcuts to do stuff, which again are *mainly* the same as the originals.

If you're looking for a real tough game, then so far I wouldn't recommend this (but only being on the first real land, I can't really say) but if you like free-roaming type games, this one will be for you. You can spend literally hours building up cities or conquering them, and following your creature around.

Anyhoo, I'm gonna be obsessed with this game for a looooong time I'll post some screenshots later

I heard you can't skip the tutorial AGAIN?

I bought it and installed it during lunch. Havent' played it yet. Looking forward to it though. Dunno about the tutorial...that was really annoying about the first game. Peter Molyneux needs to be strangled a bit (but not unto death) so he removes that stupidity in B&W3.

Maybe Molyneux should promise less and do more.

There's a patch being release soon (was meant to be out today) that will fix a couple minor issues and make it so you can skip the tutorial. You can actually ignore most of the tutorials on Lands 3 and 4, but #1 and 2 you have to do to get off the island, so that'll be sorted in the patch.

Couple of screenies:

http://www.pevilsplace.co.uk/critters.gif
Choose your creature, they're all way too cute!

http://www.pevilsplace.co.uk/babysparky.gif
My fave creature from the original was my wonderfully trained evil tiger, Sparky. So meet Sparky Jr.

http://www.pevilsplace.co.uk/pretty.gif
The first land

http://www.pevilsplace.co.uk/rain.gif
Rain on water

http://www.pevilsplace.co.uk/evilsparky.gif
He's getting evil. Notice the lava cracks under his feet

lol, looks good. I'm definetely looking forward to playing this game.

I'm surprised Pevil's playing an evil tiger. Somehow I would've figured a benevolent cow or something. :p

Dude, you should totally know the pevil is evil. Hense the name.

Anyway, she's been a tiger ever since I known!

Just played the game, It's rather simular to BnW one, a little easier to use a creature this time, maybe a little too much easier. Building is a little painstaking though, as the cameras engine is very slightly different to BnW, just enough to bug me. Things like, Zoom no long zooms Straight in, it zooms towards your hand. Regardless of where your hand is on the screen.

lol my evil tig rules all! I will have all sorts of different critters eventually though

There's a few things about crt training so far that bug me. It's much easier (no longer do you accidentally reward him for dancing with the enemy) but... well thats the problem. In about 8 hours my tig is nearly trained. My old tig still has the odd tweaks needed, and i've had him 4 years. 4 years of pretty regular playing too. I enjoyed getting him to 'perfect' then finding in the next land that he actually sucked and needed more training.

I think the problem is, the AI in the first one was smarter than the majority of people playing it And now they have even better AI, they've had to restrict it in case BnW2 starts playing the players. *sigh* Coz if you just watch the crt, its' really amazing to see how they decide to do things, suddenly change their minds, skid to a halt and head off in a new direction etc.

Also because you constantly see what they're thinking, there will probably be less surprises with them. My old tig still surprises me. I only recently found out why he became unleashed if I left him tied up. Because he'd learnt to break the rock in two, making the leash return to my hand. So I had to make sure I didn't tie him up to rocks if I wanted him to stay put. Or how he had a lil game of following the tiny horses, sheep, cows or pigs along with tiny tiny footsteps, then kicking them miles after he got bored of following them. Whereas now I'll see a big bubble come up saying "I'm going to break that rock" so there are far less surprises, in a far more sophisticated, intelligent and, potentially, more surprising AI.

Not only that, now they are intelligent, you don't teach them by showing them. To teach them a miracle now, you have to buy it with Tribute, then your crt automatically knows it. And knows WHERE to use it. Original, you had to show them both how and where/when. So if you taught your crt Fireball by casting it on a forest, he would learn to set trees on fire (yes, I found that one out with Sparky... he has a hatred of trees now. Oops).

That said, the creatures are still absolutely amazing. Just a shame we're not smart enough to fully use the AI. *damns the kids that played #1*

It's about 7.5mb for Windows Media Player.