Populous: The Beginning 1998

Is it still worth playing?

Four tribes, each led by a shaman, fight across 25 planets, and you are the blue tribe's shaman on the way to godhood, in this 1998 god game for Windows, with a PlayStation version in 1999. It was the first Populous made without Peter Molyneux, who had left the publisher in 1997. It is a real time strategy game as much as a god game: braves, warriors, firewarriors, preachers and spies take orders, build and attack, and the shaman casts 26 spells, Landbridge and Tornado among them, learned from vaults or won for a while by worship at a totem. The world is a 3D sphere, with ground that can be raised and sunk and villagers who see to the chores themselves. Its studio closed in 2001. The sphere is still a planet you can walk round, and tear up by hand.