The Bible Online: Heroes

"The Bible Online isn’t quite the game you might have imagined. This is not a rhythm-action foot-washing game, it is not a miracle-based adventure in which you must combine bread and wine to create the body and blood of Christ, and there is no destructible cover in the Garden of Gethsemane. In fact, we’re in pure Old Testament country. What’s more, The Bible Online is a slow-paced city building and resource management game that operates within your internet browser. There is some smiting involved, but it’s all rather lo-fi.

Essentially you, and many other players who share a similar disapproval of the worship of false idols, are scattered through a Genesis-based map: initially Ur, but then Haran and Canaan – the land also made famous by Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat. First off you click on pre-defined slots within your city screen to build and improve Mines, Farms, Warehouses, Walls, Markets and the like. This isn’t Command & Conquer, however, and objects take real-time hours to construct. The Bible Online is certainly not instant action; it’s an Internet Explorer window for the devout to have minimised on the desktops.

What action there is comes in after a good day of solid play – at which point you should have recruited and trained a few soldiers and attached them to Abraham, your primary Bible hero. You can then order this flickering and pixellated organ of God and his cronies around the shared map, raiding timber camps and farms and destroying stone effigies of less worthy deities. You can form alliances with other players quite early on, but once someone has been in the game for a week then an attack on them is fair game. Occasionally a quest based on real (well, textual) events extracted from the Bible will pop up too, though don’t expect to be asked to wrap your favourite son’s arms with goat hair so you can defraud a blind pensioner. That doesn’t fit.
The Bible Online isn’t a great game, and it’s as ugly as sin. It is, however, strangely addictive – as indeed are most slow-paced online games you can keep running in the background while you work. It’s quite common for religion-based games to be funded by, shall we say, the more fanatical elements within their chosen faith – which can prove uncomfortable for casual players. The Bible Online, however, actually seems quite innocuous – and ever so slightly geeky. It isn’t going to found a major new world religion, but it would be churlish to say it won’t beget a few followers.
See Bibleonlinegame.com for more details."