Cultures

Despite its good looks, this combination of Sims and Settlers suffers from a lack of excitement and a none-too-friendly tutorial. As the leader of a group of Vikings, you have to micromanage an ever-increasing number of village-dwellers, ordering them to eat, produce children, gather resources, and build structures. We lost our patience after half an hour. The game moves at a glacial pace, and there's no way to speed it up. To just get three structures built, you need to wait 10 minutes. We doubt many gamers have that kind of patience. To make matters worse, the instructions consist of long text messages, all of which you should read before trying what you ve learned. Given the complexity of the game, we would have preferred a step-by-step tutorial. We like Cultures' graphics and sound effects (it came out in 2001), but the repetitious, tedious gameplay took all the fun out of the experience.