Afterlife

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.

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
I like pretty much everything about the game. Your demonic and angelic assistants are rife with personality and contribute to the overall humorous tone of the game. The descriptions of the punishments and rewards are a scream, and the game is filled with humorous touches all over the place (such as the "Loading" screen, where you see the bar change from "35% done" to "Microwaving burritos" to "48 bottles of beer on the wall" etc).

The music is great, too.

The Bad
Afterlife has its own versions Sim City 2000's arcologies. They're called "Omnibolges" (for Hell) and Love Domes (for Heaven). Once you hit the stage of the game where you can put down the biggest of the three Omnibolges or Love Domes, the game's pretty much over.

The Bottom Line
A humor-filled, light-hearted look at the afterlife, complete with Disco Demons, the Four Surfers of the Apocalypso, Bats Out of Hell, and more! If you liked Sim City 2000, you're almost certain to like Afterlife.

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
The game is very funny, it is amusing to read all the detailed descriptions of the various punishments / rewards. But what makes it an excellent game is that it is more complex than it's obvious model, Sim City 2000. The vibes that the buildings in Hell and Heaven emit need to be taken into consideration - as it is possible to manipulate the living, it is better to let them focus on sins and virtues that don't create problems in either realm. Also, it is important to plan according to the different belief models on the planet - some people reincarnate, some wander through all punishments and rewards, some stay in Heaven forever and so on. It is important to direct the living to ease the work of the Demiurge. The player has two aides, the Demon Jasper and Ariel, who do tutorials and report problems in both realms, at least when they are not tied up into insulting each other.

The Bad
When both realms are at their full strength, the game becomes a little bit unclear and nothing really new happens. All is about maximizing balance, thus efficiency of the buildings, which soon becomes a tedious task. What can be seen as a goal of the game - as far as I remember to reach 1.000.000.000 souls in order to gain the most sophisticated special buildings available - can take a very, very, very long time.

The Bottom Line
A Sim City like game with an esoteric theme where the player has to build up and administrate Hell and Heaven.

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
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.

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