Play Populous: The Promised Lands Online

Game Overview

Populous: The Promised Lands takes the already wild god-game chaos of the original and cranks it up with some seriously weird (and fun) new worlds. One minute you're terraforming a Wild West desert, the next you're dropping disasters on a pixelated "Bit Plains" landscape that looks like it escaped from an old arcade machine.

The expansion throws in 500 new maps, which is great because the original started feeling familiar after a while. I spent way too much time in Paint Map mode messing with the new terrain options—there’s something satisfying about carving rivers into a blocky grid world before unleashing earthquakes on unsuspecting followers.

It’s still classic Populous at heart—you nudge your little people around, flatten mountains, and occasionally smite the opposition with divine lightning. But now you can do it in a world that looks like a French Revolution painting gone wrong. The extra maps and customization make it feel like a proper expansion, not just a reskin.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".