If you've never played the original Populous, or even the old PS1 release, here's what to expect. You take control of one of five different gods, each with their own specific attribute, like Fire, Earth, Harvest, Wind, and Water. You battle it out with another god, or demon, that will possess the same type of attribute. Like most games featuring these elements, each element has it's own weakness, so you'll do better against Fire if you're facing it with Water, and so on.

Once you've picked your deity of choice, then you'll be plopped down on a small map, divided by a series of squares, with each square being movable as you try and shape the land to accommodate the humans that populate the planet. For your side, every follower is represented as a blue piece, and you need to level out the land so they can begin to build houses and castles, and thus multiply to control more pieces of the land. On the DS this plays out on both the touch screen and the top screen, with all the controlling and simple looking stuff being on the bottom screen, and your followers and structures being better represented with some sub-standard looking 3D guys at the top. It's not a game that's about the graphics, to be sure, but it's still not all that appealing to the eyes.

As you begin to spread out across the land, your opponent will do the same. At the top of the touch screen you'll have a meter that gauges how much worship you're generating, which is directly related to how many followers you currently have in play. As this meter fills, so does a gauge on the bottom left, which lays out certain godly powers you can put into play. About half of these, (seems to be 6 different abilities per god), are destructive, allowing you to attack the other sides followers. You can call down a meteorite, create a devastating volcano, plague the land with swamps that eat up followers, and so on. Each god has their own specific attacks, and as I said earlier, depending on the type of demon you're facing off against, some will be more effective than others.

Each map has a certain time limit as well, and once that limit is reached, then Armageddon kicks in. Once this occurs, every follower on the map will battle it out till the end, so ideally you want that meter at the top to be far larger than your opponents before Armageddon kicks in. Of course, if you've started to overpower your foe early, you can (assuming you have the magic) start the end of everything a little early, so you don't need to play something out till the end if you don't want to.

I vaguely remember playing the SNES version, and I never played the PS1 game, but I'd say this seems to mirror my memories on the Super Nintendo quite a bit. Graphically it's not a step up, and there's nothing too remarkable about the music, but the core gameplay is still really addictive. Using the stylus to control the terraforming is a natural fit, but it's also a little too sensitive at times, especially when you're scrambling to fix a piece of land, and it can be easy to sink it too low or bring it up too high, which can disrupt your current structures in play. It's also easy and quick to fix, so it's not a major complaint.

There is a multiplayer mode as well, where you can battle it out with up to 4 players, but I could never find a match to get into, so I didn't get to test this out as much. The multiplayer plays out in the exact same fashion as the single player game, with the same idea about building up followers and unleashing the end when you're ahead, so I can't imagine it being too broken or different as well. There's also one mini-game that plays out like a book of Where's Waldo, where you're given a certain type of follower to look for on the map, and you have to point him out amidst a group of other nearly identical guys. There's not a whole lot to this mode, and it's pretty much something that could be missing from the game and I wouldn't even notice it's absence.

All together though, despite not being the best looking, best sounding, or feature filled game in the DS library, Populous is still quite a bit of fun when you get down to it. The main campaign will last you for a little bit, and you have to unlock all the gods if you want to see everything the game has to offer (you only start out with Earth). I imagine if you can get a group of friends together to check out multiplayer it'll help extend the life of the game quite a bit as well, and I definitely suggest it to both players that have never tried Populous before, and to those that remember the game from back in the day.