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Populous 2. Pop-u-less Two. Pop! Eweless, Too. No matter how you say it, there's no escaping the fact that this is the sequel to that game. It's been a long time coming, but now, at last, Monopoly 2 is finally here. Or is it Populous 2? Ed Ricketts is a little confused...

An awful crime has been committed. Exhibit A: thousands - nay, millions - of poor helpless game-players devoting every spare moment to the conquering of one game. The perpetrators; a programming team known only as Bullfrog. The game in question: Populous, the first god-game and, some say, still the best. It's just been re-released on budget. Unrepentant at enslaving half the country's population, Bullfrog have revamped their original torture, made it bigger, better and even better than that, and called their new weapon Populous 2.

In the unlikely event that you have not the slightest idea of how Populous is played, it goes a little bit like this. You are a deity battling for control of an isometric 3D world upon which scurry your subjects. They look to you to provide them with flat land to settle on, which you can do by raising and lowering the land appropriately. The more flat land they have available, the larger the house it is that they build.

It's to your advantage to have as large a population as possible because every one of your subjects prays to you, thereby increasing your manna level. Your subjects also need protecting from the enemy.

Enemy? Well, there's another deity fighting against you for control of the world, who's also looking after his own subjects and throwing all the catastrophic effects he can at you. The other player may be ST-controlled, or you can link up two STs with a lead or modem in the same way as you can in Populous and have two human players. Ah yes, the effects. These are things like deadly plagues, impenetrable swamps, lava-spewing volcanoes and violent storms that you or the enemy can inflict on the other side to reduce its population and thereby the level of manna the other god has.

That's where the manna comes in - the more you have, the more effects you can use. It controls the actual level of devastation that these effects wreak and it is also needed to raise and lower land, so it's extremely important not to run out. So, you have two goals - to keep your population growing by giving them land to build on, thus boosting your manna, and to wipe out every person on the enemy's side, thus completing the world.

And that's Populous.

What's improved from Populous 1? Everything. The graphics are the first thing to strike you. The people have grown taller and there's all sorts of them now; young women, old men, middling nondescript things. Their houses are more detailed too, and they grow in more stages, from tents to castles. The sea laps around the shore and even changes its direction during a game.

One of the worst things about the first Populous was raising or lowering the landscape and then waiting for the display to catch up with your cursor. Now you have the opposite problem: the display actually seems to go faster than you, with the result that you end up doing more than you wanted. It's speedy, to say the least.

The screen layout has been modified. There are fewer icons, but they do the same amount of work, so it's less confusing for the absolute beginner. You can expand the main display to the full screen at any time to give you the bigger piture.

But the biggest change is to the effects. Populous 1 always left you wishing for more, and with Populous 2 that's what you get: 29 delectable effects now divided into six groups according to their, well, effect. So, for example, in the Vegetation group you get Trees, Fungus, Flowers, Swamp and a Hero.

Each group has a hero, and they're the equivalent of the knights from Populous 1: superhuman fighters than can seriously thrash the opposition for you. Although they all basically head off to the other side and beat up everyone they see, they do it differently. The Vegetation hero splits in two when he wins a battle: the Fire hero burns everything he touches; and the Water heroine leads the enemy to a watery death.

You have to be careful with some of the effects because they may just backfire on you. Plaguing the other side may seem a good idea but if one of their people touches you, you're in trouble. Ensure the columns of fire you send off to the enemy don't decide to come back and torch your houses.

The effects you can use depend on the world you're playing. There are 500 or so worlds to play in the Conquest game (the standard game). As you complete each world, you're given a password which gives you access to a higher one. How much higher depends on your popularity rating from the last one. On the lower worlds you're given, at most, two effects in each group. This is to introduce you to them slowly and train you to use the less effective ones before you get your hands on a volcano.

Not all the effects are destructive. Some of them are designed to make life that bit nicer for your subjects. They love a few trees or flowers around the place, and city walls and roads make them feel secure. The moral is not to get too carried away with bashing the enemy, because your own people are more important.

The effects aren't let down by their graphics. Earthquakes, volcanoes, whirlwinds and tidal waves sweep across the screen, causing graphical havoc splendidly. Switch to the full screen view and you can get quite carried away - just like the houses and trees in the streams of lava. There are the samples to match: a moaning wind for the whirlwind, an ominous "gloop" when someone falls into a swamp, and the almost permanent sound of lapping water.

This full version of Populous 2 requires 1MByte of RAM to work, so you need a 1040ST or an upgraded 520ST to run it. Although Bullfrog plan to release a 0.5MByte version soon, this will have the samples replaced with sound chip effects and might even have other bits cut out.

Why deny yourself the chance to play the biggest game of the year? If you've still got a 0.5MByte ST, you're missing out not only on some of the best games to be released but also a lot of "serious" software. Get yourself a 0.5MByte upgrade. It's worth it in the long run.

The best fit-it-yourself board available is Frontier Software's Xtra-RAM Deluxe 0.5MByte upgrade. At £69.99, it's not really the cheapest available, but the build quality is high. You don't have to do any soldering unless you have a very old ST, but if you like, Frontier can collect your ST, fit the upgrade and return it to you, all by courier, for an all-inclusive price of £40 extra. The upgrade board is also expandable at a later date to 2.5 or 4MByte.

We reviewed all the ST memory upgrades in issue 25.

Bullfrog have crammed everything that was missing from their first opus into Populous 2 and made a game that's playable, challenging, exciting, as difficult as you like and great, great fun.

There's so much to experiment with and so much that's not apparently obvious, that even if you completed the 500-odd words in the Conquest game, you could go back and complete them all again in a totally different way - and still find hundreds of things you never noticed before. For instance, how would you get over the enemy's castle wall, short of knocking it down? Whip up a whirlwind near one of your people and hope that it carries him/her over the wall. Because whirlwinds don't damage people, he'll be perfectly safe and you'll have gained a foothold in the enemy's camp.

The Bullfrogs' last game, PowerMonger, had two major failings - it was rushed and there just wasn't enough to do. Bullfrog have obviously learnt their lesson on both counts. All the time that's passed since it was first announced has been well spent, and, as a result, chances are that Populous 2 will be sitting on your hard drive for years.

All this hyperbole doesn't mean that there's nothing wrong with the game. There's still a heck of a lot of uninteresting land levelling to be done (though you can tell your ST to handle this if you like). Most of the earlier games, where you don't have many effects, tend to be plain and simple population races, and end in Armageddons.

The Bullfrogs have also taken care of the more frustrating aspects of the game. Moving between the main display and the movement arrows on the small map is a real pain in the neck, so there's the option of using the cursor keys instead. And because even one game can take upwards of 20 minutes, you also have the facility to save and load partly-conquered worlds.

If a game ever deserved the label "Epic", Populous 2 does. The seemingly interminable waiting, the hype, the superlatives, they're all totally and utterly justified. Even if you bought Populous (and who didn't?) get your mitts on Populous 2. You know it makes sense.

1. The game that started it all now has a slew of imitators, but none go as far as Populous 2.
2. Utopia's graphics are a little "cleaner" and more colourful, but they're not as well animated.
3. Beats PowerMonger on almost every count; graphics, speed, interest, title screen...
4. Not as light-hearted as Mega Lo Mania... just as involving.