Afterlife

The Good
I loved Sim City and I loved this one. It's harder than it's Maxis predecessor, but still good. It's complex nature is perfect for the demiurge player. Everyone should play this game, whether they believe in an afterlife or not. Lucasarts should pursue an Afterlife 2 with different stuff.

The Bad
The only I didn't like about the game, is that I wasn't very good at it. Other than that, it was pretty good.

The Bottom Line
Fun, Sim city like, a must play

The Good
Well, it was original...

The Bad
The game mechanics were just too complex. The learning curve was really high, and the amount of work requred to get a little humorus payoff did not work for me.

The Bottom Line
A great idea, but probably not enough design/prototyping to insure it was fun from the start.

The Good
The idea is divine. The concept of building a really horrible hell and a divine heaven is excellent. The atmosphere is wonderful, the graphics are nice (although "pixely"), and the music is probably the best music I've heard in a game ever. Really. The music is so great I wouldn't mind listening to it outside the game. The humor is also very good. Extremely dark and sometimes sadist, but always funny. It's also an innovative game with original buildings to erect and a very innovative system. It's like Sim City, but totally different. The way you have to deal with souls, karma, beliefs, reincarnation and economy is quite original although familiar at the same time. It really is an innovative and entertaining game with a lot of atmosphere and dark humor.

The Bad
The actual gameplay is flawed in many ways. The biggest problem is the micro-management. Because the graphics are so "pixely" it is often hard to make out individual buildings amidst the myriad of pixels. The problem with this is that you are more or less forced to "balance" all of your buildings or else you will start losing money real fast, and you have to balance your buildings frequently as souls come and go. There is a function that is supposed to help you to auto-balance all you buildings, but it is virtually worthless. It costs a lot of money and it doesn't work very well. The only way to make money is to balance every building yourself, and that takes a LOT of time and it is extremely boring, and difficult since the individual buildings are so hard to make out due to the pixely graphics. Also there are too much that has to be perfect. This really is a difficult game.Your advisors constantly complain about things that are quite hard to do anything about, and it is always the same things. "Bad/Good Influence", "Bad/Good Roads" etc (In Hell everything must be bad. Bad is good and good is bad in hell.) As you can see this game is sadly tainted by some huge, very unnecessary flaws. The balance-thing is the biggest flaw. When you have a lot of buildings both in heaven and hell, the situation becomes unbearable. If you didn't have to do that annoying micro-management constantly when you play, this game would only suffer from a quite steep level of difficulty, but a real challenge never hurt anyone, right?

The Bottom Line
Good atmosphere, the best music ever in a computer game, and lots of fun, dark humor. But the game promises more than the actual gameplay can deliver. Still worth to check out, though. It is quite enjoyable at first, but overwhelming as soon as your heaven and hell starts to grow large.