Part of this is the game's universally abysmal artificial intelligence. Not only is your creature dumb ("I'm going to go munch on those rocks!" it says) but the citizen AI is also sickly stupid. You'll welcome a migration to your city (hooray!) but they'll then decide to stay outside your influence ring and slowly die out, thereby robbing you of their manpower. On the plus side, once you figure out the AI's ridiculously simple battle tactics, many of the missions are very easy to complete. I set up my wall with archers and because it was so close to the enemy rallying point, they constantly picked off enemy soldiers without me having to do anything. The enemy platoons, for their part, just stood there and wondered where the rain of arrows was coming from.

The game separates good from evil and encourages you to use whatever tactics work best for the given situation. You are encouraged to use whatever tactics you want, but what it comes down to is the amount of time you want to invest. If you don't mind spending days on a mission then you won't mind playing the good path, which takes many hours to build up an impressive enough city to ultimately win the land. The enemy city will also seek to become more impressive, and so you basically play a dumbed-down version of SimCity for hours and wait until victory or boredom occurs.

The evil side is pretty simple to win. You build up a massive army and send your troops with your powered-up creature to wreak havoc on the neighboring cities. Instead of playing SimCity, you'll be playing the world's wonkiest war RTS game. There are only a couple of troop types to use, a limited number of tactics to employ with them, and a control system not designed for timed troop management. Build up the experience of your archers by deploying them in your walls and upgrade your creature by giving him lots of opportunities to chew on enemy platoons. Throw the whole mix at the enemy town and win.

If playing as extremely good or evil doesn't do it for you, you can do a combination of both. Though I take issue with the game's designation of self-defense as evil, basically any use of your creature for war and any construction of armory buildings will be considered evil. In any given map, it's easiest to build up your city with some limited archer defenders and then finally build up that army to take out the enemy's major city center.

But just the RTS, pet-sim, and SimCity elements of the game do not equate a god simulator. Black and White 2 also has a handful of supernatural miracles you can perform. Your citizens worship at an altar and can grant you mana to cast spells. These include healing, fire, lightning and (on the epic scale) volcanoes. They're fun, and can become intuitive by the use of hand gestures with your mouse, but they still feel somewhat limited.