Afterlife

The Good
Afterlife (1996) clearly demonstrates a tremendous amount of good-old- fashion LucasArts creativity, passion and talent that has generally worked well for them. On paper, the opportunity to control the daily workings of Heaven and Hell, through the creation of various rewards and punishments sounds like a fun simulation. In practice, the game does feature some impressive graphics, music and sound effects and a witty sense of humor.

The Bad
The fundamental flaw in the game lies in the execution. Their are simply too many, highly complicated, real time things (i.e. virtues, vices, infrastructure, etc.) that you have to constantly watch out for and develop in both heaven and hell or else its game over. Making the execution worse, the game's instruction manual failed to offer an in-depth explanation of the controls, mechanics and rules. This forced the player to go through a frustrating period of trial and error or buy an official LucasArts strategy guide. While the graphics are good most of the time, close-ups of objects look terrible.

The Bottom Line
Afterlife (1996) is a Simcity-style clone that attempts to put you in control of an alien population's heaven and hell. The execution is critical in simulation games such as this, and this is where the game's flaws show up. A tremendous amount of trial and error, or access to a good, in-depth strategy guide will be required to really comprehend how to do much in the game. The game's graphics are best seen from a distance. Perhaps the best feature of this game is its amazingly witty and satirical sense of humor. Die hard fans of LucasArts humor and "Simcity" simulation games will probably get the most out of this game.

The Good
This is a fun world builder game that came out after people started calling world builder's "god games", then took that idea to a whole new level. It has some quirky humor that fits right in with the other non-Star Wars themed LucasArts games at the time. Unlike some other reviewers, I didn't find the game that complex to manage, but I was also playing games like SimCity 2000 and Civilization 2 around the same time period.

The Bad
The different ports of the game varied graphically, with the Macintosh port being far superior, supporting at least 16-bit color, if not 24-bit. Even in 8-bit color mode, the color palette on the Mac version represented the source artwork better than DOS or Windows. As best I can tell, the GoG version of the game is DOS version and suffers a bit for it.

The Bottom Line
Regardless of the graphics, this is a fun game to play, especially if you like other world builders of the period. But, if you can scrounge up an old Mac version of the game and a PowerPC Mac, that's the superior way to play.

The Good
Much like the SimCity series, this game has a really fun feel to it, with great graphics, really nice control layout, and a few funny secrets to be discovered by true LucasArts fans.

The Bad
While it IS a great idea, the game itself takes a longer time to get the hang of than the average sim game. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it seems more like bad to me. Also, the thrill wore off rather quickly.

The Bottom Line
This game plays on the idea of good versus evil, as you play landlord to Heaven and Hell. LucasArts is possibly the best game developer out there, and the undisputed champion of adventure games. But in the future, they should stick to what they know best.