Developer: Madcat/Eigelb

Publisher: CDV
Release Date: Out Now
RRP: £29.99, $19.99
 

Heaven or Hell? Good or Evil? This is the moralistic question that has plagued mankind since the beginning of time. This latest offering from CDV Software Entertainment AG and Madcat Interactive Software attempts to find an answer to that question.

Heaven and Hell is a God game crossed with a massive Real Time Strategy element, where you have the choice to play as a Good or Evil God who tries to convert citizens of different settlements to your faith. You have Baptists, violent preachers, road and even amusement park builders at your disposal. These entities help you in your quest to convince the people to follow your belief in many amusing ways. The baptists invoke miracles and visions, and preach your message to the masses. They are assisted by the Beat-up-bons (or mals, depending on good or evil respectively), who go around beating people up, after enlisting the help of radicals. The Camel-bon (or mal) creates a route for your team to reach different settlements and so on.

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As with most RTS games today, there is a campaign mode and a skirmish mode (for one player purposes).When you start campaign mode, you can only play as Good, since the Evil campaign is unlocked after completion of the Good one. The campaign mode starts you off with a Baptist-bon who has to go and convert a settlement with the aid of a Beat-up-bon to help you in your efforts. The aim of the first mission is merely to take over the settlement and spread the word. Amusing cut scenes in the vein of the Worms games add a bit of humour to the experience.

The next mission involves you having to take over a settlement by the time the sun has set you know what time it is by a gage on the. At sunset, your settlement is invaded by Evil troops, similar to your own, who attempt to spread their message, by any means necessary. Once, you have fought them off, you have to go to the next settlement and so on. The game continues with you spreading your message to different settlements and the obstacles getting harder as you go along. As the game progresses you are required to build your own buildings, the Amuse-a-bon (Amusement park builder) is the only one who does this.

The Evil campaign is very similar except for little things, such as the use of rock music instead of the heavenly choir and instead of amusement parks; the Evil evangelists have casinos and brothels. Skirmish mode helps you play missions as either Good or Evil, if you don't have the time or inclination to play the campaign. This is fun and gives you access to all the characters you can use. Goals can be changed, as in most RTS games. For example, you can either aim to eradicate all opposing forces or to trigger the end of the world.

This game plays like an RTS, in the sense that you click on a person and then click on the map to send them there. Alternatively, you click on a person and click on an enemy to make him attack. But, the God game characteristics mean you can also pick up a person and drop him at a location, or stroke him to consolidate faith. With the evil campaigns, faith consolidation is done by slapping them around, which is a lot like the game, Black and White. The game is entirely mouse-driven, but like RTS games, you can use keys on the keyboard to carry out a certain action for you. Overall the game play gets a bit repetitive over time; you constantly have to repeat the same tasks whether its organising beat up teams, preaching or just making sure the message is heard. Things only have to be done quicker as the game progresses to avoid defeat.

On the music and sound side, all

Graphically, this game doesn't have to be state-of-the-art, but cutesy graphics add to the experience and environments are pretty well created with grass that blows in the wind and terrains are well defined. With a better machine, you are able to integrate shadows, fog and other little touches that make it look a little more realistic.

A helpful tutorial enables you to familiarise yourself with the controls and get to grips with the game if you are new to the RTS scene. In addition, every time you receive a new character, pop up frames tell you how to use him. These pop up frames appear very frequently, telling you about objectives and giving you hints.

On the whole, Heaven and Hell is a fun game, marred by repetitiveness and annoying background music. The concept is a clever one that could have worked better with the introduction of a few more variables, like the ability to make opposing forces sick, so they had to find someone to use an antidote spell, or something along those lines.