It's time to dust off those mayoral skills: heaven and hell are expecting a new influx of souls and -- narcissism aside -- you're god. If you're careful and plan well you'll make hell-bound souls suffer almost as much as they would installing Win95 on a 286. Turn out to be a better landlord than Peter and the Birds of Paradise will only besmirch one or two new Honda Del Sols.

Afterlife, Lucas Arts' addition to the rich world of sandbox sim games, puts you in charge of the urban development of heaven and hell. You'll control the traffic of souls by laying down roads, zone for seven virtues and seven vices (Envy, Contentment, Avarice, Charity, etc.), and add special buildings to the maps of your after-realms. The Disco Inferno and other not-so-natural disasters may arrive to lay waste your carefully laid plans while souls wait in convenient Limbo Bars.

For those of you unfamiliar with sim games, your job is to build a city -- or in Afterlife's case two cities -- which successfully accommodate souls and then prosper and grow. Using a familiar palette of tools, you'll lay down roads, zone a 3-D grid prepared for specific types of buildings, add special buildings of your own, build gates, hire angels, consult graphs, and decide where to put that next Karma station. While no specific goal has been set for you, you may measure success by population growth -- Afterlife rewards players as their cities collect souls. As a sandbox game, how you build heaven and hell is entirely up to you.

While no-one objects when a software developer adds yet one more word processor to the market, Afterlife displays an immediate bias toward the Hindu belief in reincarnation: this game could very well have been released as a graphics add-on for Maxis' Sim City 2000. Very little design work went beyond simply applying a new metaphor to an existing game. You'll lay out roads just as you did in SimCity, with the same rules applying to spacing and grids, in the same top-down diagonal view. Buildings grow just as they did in SimCity, and virtually identical charts and graphs will help you foster your population growth. In fact the game so closely resembles SimCity 2000 that personally the learning curve and corresponding challenge was quite tame.

But who cares? Let's count the DOOM clones, shall we? Afterlife is a welcome addition to the sim family, if perhaps the resemblance is uncanny. The graphics are extraordinary; each building has been painstakingly detailed, the advisors wonderfully animated, and various disasters hilariously drawn. The rich detail in the game makes playing in this sandbox a delight -- each building has a corresponding story which would make even old Ebeneezer himself think well of ghosts. The rewards in Afterlife come complete with fully rendered illustrations and sound, and players may follow the progress of individual souls. Jasper and Aria, the online animated helpers, offer an easy to follow tutorial (saving impatient gamers from the manual) and let players know when their realms need improving. Afterlife excels in its presentation.

Unfortunately, Afterlife's interface is a bit idiosyncratic. Navigating the map is almost impossible: try switching to the map window and clicking on the place you want to go -- give up on the scroll bars altogether. Use the arrow keys for minor adjustments. Furthermore, Lucas Arts should be chastised for furthering carpal tunnel syndromes -- players are forced to close windows by mousing to the close box. Command-W won't work. Also the game's graphics -- while fantastic -- get in the way. It's easy to miss by one or two squares when laying down objects. You'll find it may be easier to play with the graphics turned off -- a necessary if unfortunate option.

Finally, Afterlife's game play has one seriously annoying flaw. Forgive the fact that you have to worry about traffic in heaven, or that (for some odd reason) Karma gates give off bad vibes. Each building in the game has a balance -- of what the manual never properly explains -- which constantly needs to be tweaked in order to have a properly "efficient" heaven or hell. This massively intrusive "feature" of the game forces players to periodically select each building on their maps to reset it. Once your population grows to a significant amount, you'll find yourself bored with endlessly balancing individual building settings. If you opt to use the auto-balancing tool -- if you can figure out how it works -- you'll say goodbye to large chunks of your budget. This entire feature could have been left out and actually improved the game.

All in all, Afterlife is a fun diversion for sim lovers who're wondering if there's life after SimCity 2000. It'll bring out the best anal-retentive qualities in all of us and infuse some welcome humor into our overly-serious game playing lives. If you've never played SimCity 2000, though, pass up Afterlife and grab the original for its superior game-play.

Been there. Done that.

-- Scott
July 8, 1996.

"Scott's Addictions" are postings about the games I play as I play them. When a game captures my interest and becomes a front-burner favorite, I'll post a tidbit or two here for you fellow gamers to enjoy. I'll only post the best games of my crop. No ratings, just ravings. And I'm semi-agnostic: I love the Mac, tolerate my PC, and split time on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64.

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