Populous II : Two Tribes
Wrongly forgotten sequel #8
Type of Game
A New Testament for new crusades and even crazier worshippers
Release date on our machines
1993, only the gods know the exact month.
Developer
Bullfrog Productions, Ltd. The best of the best—with honors!
Publisher
They were pretty close to being the best, too, right up until 2004 and their breakup. Farewell.
Populous II : available on GOG, Steam and the Epic Games Store. The computer version, of course. But this whole thing is still totally unexpected.
Before we begin, let’s ask ourselves: what was the thinking behind this cover art? Who approved this monstrosity? Why didn’t they just keep the same cover as the PC versions—and the title Trial of the Olympian Gods while they were at it? Now nobody has a clue what’s going on! Just another move by those Sega haters! Alright, let’s take a deep breath and dive in. The first Populous has to be in my top 3 all-time favorite, cherished Mega Drive games. I worshipped it from age six to fifteen, and I’ve even replayed it regularly on an emulator throughout my life, just for the pleasure of seeing those sprites again—as ugly as they are endearing. In 1993, when the second game came out, the console was still running at full speed at home—and so was the Populous 1 cartridge. And if I’d known it existed back then, I would’ve moved heaven and earth to get it. Haha, like a god, hahaha, uh… Well! I wouldn’t have let it slip by until it was too late, like I did with so many sequels. Not with this one! Especially if I’d read any of the rave reviews and learned about its many improvements over its predecessor. There’s no way I could have missed a hit like that. But an unfortunate series of events meant I didn’t discover it until the 2010s.
Little blind sheep
No Nelson or Mortimer Paprika to own the cartridge, no John-Blazer Escalope or Patrick Crèmerie to pull the game out of thin air between sessions of Sonic Spinball and Streets of Rage. No Randall Geyser to show it to me on the Atari ST, no Walter Valise to give me a masterclass on the Super NES or on the computer, no Terrence Dobermann to take me to the secret alcove where he kept his Amiga. Yeah, okay, I’d just never looked for it myself either—like an idiot. I just prefer to blame others to cover up my own shortcomings.
Reforms and Conservatism
Let’s take a look at the features carried over from the first game. You play as a god—or something like that—and that hasn’t changed. In fact, there’s a general consensus that Populous invented the “god game” genre, but I’d be careful not to pretend to be an expert on the subject. Stay humble, too, will you? This god seeks to make his fanatics… uh, followers, prosper, in order to eradicate the opposing faction without the slightest mercy. OK! Still in the same vein as the first game. The tribal chief, accompanied by a few parishioners, wanders around an isometric map and sets up his house on the first available flat tile. The dwellings allow new inhabitants to proliferate, who will in turn build their own shacks, and so on. The more houses you own, the more your mana bar fills up, and the more spells (called “divine interventions”) you can cast. The more you clear the area around a house, the larger it grows, the more mana it produces, and the more powerful people it spawns—but it’ll take longer to do so.
They will thus strike harder when the inevitable confrontation with the infidels comes. We exercise no direct control over this teeming rabble, only on the ground. Indirectly, we have various means of influencing them, notably by guiding their behavior: whether to grow peacefully, expand their empire aggressively, or merge with the leader to make him stronger. Certain divine interventions also disrupt the seemingly placid daily lives of all these individuals. Each “world,” or game level, has its own rules—such as which spells are banned or allowed, how long it takes for people to die when they fall into water, and whether the depth of swamps causes them to vanish after swallowing one or more people. Among other things. Wow, just thinking about all that makes me want to start my own cult… uh, religion.
Populous II: Two Tribes of the Trial of the Olympian Gods and the ugliest cover in the universe takes the original concept to the letter, while improving on almost everything! First of all, the storyline is wrapped up in Greek mythology, no doubt to try to draw in as many new players as possible who might have found the first Populous a bit austere. I don’t know—doesn’t the first one already have something to do with ancient Greece and all that? Hmm, good question. But no, I don’t think so. Anyway, you step into the shoes of a slightly megalomaniacal son of Zeus, who decides to claim the top spot on Mount Olympus. Victory condition: crush the heads of your thirty-two opponents. Opponents who are none other than your brothers and sisters, as well as Zeus himself. Still as narcissistic and twisted as ever, this one. Though, come to think of it, you seem even worse than him here.
You create an avatar by choosing the size of the chin, the angle of the squint, and the severity of the baldness. So cool! Everquest didn’t invent anything, actually! Then I see “experience points” written there. Excuse me? Yeah, the guys at Bullfrog introduced real progression into the game. Well done—you’ve converted me to your way of thinking, as if I still needed convincing of anything. These points are used to improve your mastery of the six spell categories (nature, water, fire, air, earth, and… uh, human, okay?), thereby unlocking associated divine abilities. This lets you choose your playstyle—either by spreading yourself thin across all elements with moderately powerful abilities, or by focusing on a specific category to unlock its most devastating options. In total, you have about thirty spells at your disposal, compared to just eight before. I’ve learned that the player’s performance determines the number of experience points earned at the end of each stage.
It also determines how many stages you skip (going from stage eight to stage thirteen if you’ve utterly crushed your opponent, for example, instead of stage ten for a less-than-glorious victory). The enemies you face—your brothers and sisters there (or rather half-brothers and half-sisters, given Zeus’s penchant for dabbling in all sorts of affairs)—have their own specific traits as well, such as the speed at which they react to reshape the terrain, the time it takes for the inhabitants to reproduce… and so on. All these parameters determine a level’s difficulty. Just like in the first game, but better. Apparently, there are about a thousand stages. Would we get a little more landscape diversity than in the first game, just to break up the monotony of the endless string of levels? No, not really. Snowy, grassy, and desert terrain are still part of the scenery, but the volcanic terrain has been replaced by… um, yellowed grass? Let’s just say that.
A very questionable choice. I really liked the hellish atmosphere emanating from the ash-covered landscapes, surrounded by an ocean of lava. That was a better fit for the chronic wildfires that now occur every summer in our region. But anyway, a question of the utmost importance: are there still those giant creatures that sometimes appear in the middle of a game and cross the map, slaughtering everything in their path? Like the wizard who created trees, the gray goblin-like creature that spat out mountains, and the slimy amphibian that… excreted swamps. I loved those things! Especially because they freaked me out a little, and they broke up the sometimes-soporific routine of a gaming session. They killed dozens of people, sure, but at least something was happening. And they didn’t give a damn about our bigoted squabbles. Well, I did see some kind of dumb dinosaur come out of a volcano, I think, but it didn’t do anything except run straight ahead while spewing a column or two of fire (which might have been coming from the volcano itself).
Actually, yes—after looking a little longer, I found others, like the gargoyle that spits out tornadoes, or something like that. But no one else in the world besides me seems to have paid any attention to these creatures. Yet this is one of the most crucial topics in the universe! Despite a clear overall improvement in the graphics, I’m still less of a fan of the art style compared to the first game. The buildings seem harder to distinguish to me, especially when it comes to the hierarchy of house sizes. Why does this shack look bigger than that mansion, when it’s actually one step lower on the evolutionary ladder? The characters look even more utterly idiotic (which they actually are, but whatever). I preferred the less cartoonish style from before, even if it was less detailed. I’d take the bowl cut and squashed silhouette of the 1990 characters any day over the lanky oafs from 1993.
Who decided that stretching them vertically was a good idea? Also, it took me quite a while to find the character “profile.” In Populous 1, that little interface in the top right corner of the screen displayed the selected character’s strength and preferred weapon, with the weapon determined by the type of house the character emerged from. Actually, after searching a bit longer, I did find it. It’s just much worse designed and not clear at all. Anyway, I preferred the medieval style of the first game to anything else when I was eight or nine years old. Sorry to the fans of temples, gorgons, and divine inbreeding! I get your love for the ancient style, but nope, sorry. Oh, I’m not eight or nine anymore—my bad. Alright, I get it. Still, the look on the knights’ faces in the first game when they win a battle and burn down a house they just cleared of its inhabitants—aaaahahahaha! Unforgettable. That little dance they do before the flames engulf the surroundings… For that alone, I’m sticking with the medieval art style.
The Hell of Silence
Oh! Hell and damnation! By Jove and damn it all! The incessant sound of the heartbeat is gone! Nooo! Maybe it was getting on too many people’s nerves. I actually liked it. Well, I’d gotten used to it, and it gave me a nice little rush when it sped up. It also made me panic, but I guess that suited me just fine. So, in return, what do we get? Ah, well, nothing. No other ambient sounds, and still no music! We have to make do with a few sound effects during battles, when casting spells, and—new this time—when people die; a single, really annoying FX that plays about a thousand times per game, then. Worse still, there isn’t even an intro screen after the SEGA logo anymore—the only time we got to hear anything in the first game. I’m browsing through the other versions of Populous II and… what do I find? The Amiga version (the original, released in 1991) actually gets its own heartbeat sound! The Super NES port is treated to a cool intro, complete with text, images, AND MUSIC! The DOS version is the same—it even has two intros! One of them is super cringey and does a half-hearted job of explaining the plot and a few gameplay features. No wonder the game has a different name for each version on every platform. I’m sharing this memorable moment with you in audio form—it’s even weirder without the visuals.
A Failed Calling
Even if I’m just being a cheap reactionary—a die-hard fan of the first Populous—just for the way it expanded on the basic concept, I would have set aside my aversion to the new graphics and loved Populous II like never before! Can you really call yourself anything but a reactionary if you rave about a 1993 video game rather than its 1990 predecessor? I doubt it. And at least this installment stuck with an isometric view, unlike its sequel, which plunged its characters into the controversial world of full 3D, ruining all its charm in the process. In any case, my tendency to love just about everything as a kid would have probably made me love the graphics, too. And, just like with the first one, I could have imagined new spells, new types of houses and terrain, and listed them on sheets of paper during my summer vacation. I spent a lot of time doodling stuff on paper instead of going swimming or playing with my friends.
Seriously, I already spend my time reminiscing about Bullfrog’s glory days—Theme Park being the prime example—so this wouldn’t have helped my situation at all. Would it have influenced my entire game library? It wouldn’t have taken much to tip me over the edge. I would have spent more than three hours on Magic Carpet, for starters. Then I would have thrown myself headfirst into the third Populous, as well as Black & White, all the Fable games… and of course I would have wasted my money on the Godus Kickstarter, getting ripped off by Peter Molyneux and his many broken promises. I still remember the hype I felt when I went to see him give his masterclass at the Cité des Sciences in La Villette. He’d announced his new project, not forgetting to ask us for financial support. I actually believed him, for crying out loud. Luckily, dusting off Dungeon Keeper was enough to cool my enthusiasm. As for you, I’m still madly in love with you—never forget that!
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