Afterlife

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
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 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.