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Summary: A clever twist on SimCity that will tickle your funnybone and keep you up past your bedtime.
There I sat, smugly overseeing my brilliantly constructed Heaven and Hell, which were overflowing with positively euphoric and positively miserable souls, respectively. All was as it should be in Afterlife.
In fact, things were going so well in Hell that at any moment I could expect The Powers That Be to bestow the gift of The Flabbergasting Flatulence Ol-Factory. (A sense of humor is required to play this game.) Then things would get really bad in Hell, which, of course, would mean even finer rewards were just around the corner. Suddenly, my Afterlife advisors, Jasper (Hell) and Aria (Heaven), popped up to inform me that while I had plenty of souls in Heaven and Hell, most of those souls didn't believe in the realms' existence. Yikes! That couldn't be good.
What to do? Simple: With a little cash, I could bribe some actors to espouse religions with those beliefs (there are 24 different religions in all) and thereby boost my souls' belief in the afterlife. Done. Anxiously, I watched the population graph. Yes! The populations were increasing--slowly.
Too slowly, it turned out. Suddenly, all my structures in Hell started turning to ice--Hell was freezing over!--and all the structures in Heaven were turning blue and shutting down. Heaven was getting the Blues. Souls started leaving Heaven and Hell like rats from a sinking ship. In minutes, my "brilliantly constructed" Afterlife was reduced to a ruined state from which it would never recover. Game over.
That's just one of hundreds of ways a typical Afterlife game can play out. There really is no goal you reach to win. Like SimCity, you try to build a prosperous Heaven and Hell by setting up and maintaining the proper population balance and the proper amount of transportation and housing.
Setting up a good balance of Fate Zoning is most important. Like residential and industrial zoning in SimCity, Fate Zoning is the process of designating--by laying down different-colored tiles--what type of souls live in particular areas. For example, souls sent to Hell for the sin of Wrath (all seven deadly sins and virtues are represented) can live only in sectors designated by red tiles. Lustful souls must live in sectors designated by purple tiles. Establish balanced Fate Zones, with each zone far enough away from its neighbor in Hell or close enough to its neighbor in Heaven, and you have the building blocks for a successful career as a Demiurge--a servant of The Powers That Be, responsible for presiding over the Afterlife.
You get cash--Pennies From Heaven, to be precise--for each soul you draw into your Afterlife. The more souls you bring in, the more money you get. The more money you get, the more interesting things you can build. The more efficient your Heaven or Hell becomes, the more money you get for each new soul. So goes the cycle.
Yet, there's much more to consider, such as which special structures and buildings give off good or bad vibes; whether or not you have enough beer to retain souls if Hell Freezes Over (and it will); and the effect of bat guano on buildings.
Such odd and funny considerations are par for the course in this clever game, but a word of warning: Afterlife is Hellaciously punny. If you don't like puns, you won't like Afterlife. If you do, you're in for a treat. Puns are everywhere, from the Bad Things that can happen to your Afterlife (such as the release of The Bats out of Hell or The Birds of Paradise, Hell in a Handbasket, and Disco Inferno) to the names of the buildings: Fiction Pulp, Seizure's Palace, and Hellrose Place (my personal favorite). In my book, the developers deserve a sincere tip of the hat for their clever, unique style of humor, which sets Afterlife apart from other, more serious sims, such as SimCity or Transport Tycoon.
But don't let the jokes fool you. Managing Heaven and Hell is hard, albeit fun, work. If Afterlife sounds a little too demanding, don't despair. You have the option of managing just Heaven or Hell--you don't have to manage both. In addition, whenever something goes wrong, you can click on Divine Intervention to put things on hold until you figure out the problem. And Jasper and Aria provide useful advice and warnings. There are also three game-speed settings: Mortal Plodding, Hounds of Hell, and Demonically Fast.
In technical terms, Afterlife is very similar to SimCity. It uses a mouse-driven interface that is complex yet intuitive--no easy task to pull off. Its basic gameplay mechanics are identical: You click, hold, drag, and release to lay down zoning and point-and-click to place individual structures. Afterlife also offers tons of easily accessible graphs and charts that cover every imaginable piece of information.
Where Afterlife differs, aside from its rampant humor, is in its extreme attention to detail. The animations and graphics of the 200-or-so rendered Rewards and Punishments (the domiciles where your souls reside in Heaven and Hell, respectively) and roughly 300 additional rendered tiles and buildings are simply superb. You also have the ability to look at profiles of individual souls. By itself, this is a hoot, but you also have the option of tracking these people as they progress through their Afterlife.
This game may be a SimCity clone, but it offers lots more to do--and lots more to worry about. Afterlife is an uproariously funny addition to the genre that will have you laughing out loud on several occasions. If you liked SimCity but thought it a bit dry, you must try this sim. Old Website Recovery