One of the best early "god games" which literally used the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus for inspiration. If you're going to make a god game, might as well grab some of the most creative and cruel you can think of in Western civilization, right?

Populous II, designed by Peter Molyneux, is a total blast to sink a few hours into. You're sometimes battling Dionysus - the Greek god of wine - how cool is that? (Note: he's pretty slow and dumb. Maybe too much wine?)

You build your population and help them by raising and lowering land. This is one aspect of the game that can cause a bit of carpal tunnel syndrome until you realize you can have the computer help flatten land for you. Doing so makes your mouse clicks much less responsive, so you have to do this strategically. Meanwhile a rival god is doing the same thing elsewhere on the little isometric pieces of land.

To slow him or her down (yes, Athena gets in on the action) and ultimately crush their followers, you can employ fist-pumping tactics against them like volcanos - smack dab in the middle of their towns - or tidal waves to wash away their land, buildings and followers (be careful you don't wash away your own!). Then there's always the trusty rain of fire or lightening storm, among many other delicious powers at your fingertips.

All in all a very enjoyable game. Some levels, on your pursuit to Zeus himself, can become quite difficult and feel a bit impossible. But Populous II is a classic to pick up and enjoy over and over like a sadistic game of solitaire. Since there are 1,000 different maps you'll not grow bored any time soon on your conquests.

Note about the screenshots:
These were taken from an A1200 running in PAL mode, ECS chip set (it crashes in AGA mode). The disks were created in the UK presumably for a PAL market. Interestingly, this game still employs small title boxing at the top and bottom of the game. The monitor (a Commodore 1084S) was set to a PAL workbench when the game launched from HDD. Any distortion is either from the curvature of the convex glass of the monitor, or otherwise unintentional. You can see in the copy protection screen that the random god face is quite close to the print in the manual (maybe a hair off, but pretty spot on). It is believed by us that this game - bizarrely - did ship with this graphical anomaly.

Screenshots