Populous™: The Beginning
Worth it · RPG · 2024
The verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $4.99.
- Length
- 23.8h 32.6h to 100%
- Value
- $0.21/hr
- Reviews
- 88% of 454 positive
Watch this gameOne alert at a price you pick.
Buy now or wait
Discounted in each of its last 8 seasonal sales. Last cut ended 9 days ago.
- Next sale
- Winter Sale, Dec 17 to Jan 4
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
About the game
In the third part of the Populous series, you control your shaman and the tribe of her followers in a difficult quest to conquer all 25 planets of a star system and ascend to godhood.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, 399 MB of storage. Windows only.
The value story
It has been discounted 19 times in the 3 years tracked here. The median cut across all of them is 50 percent, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended 9 days ago.
On value it sits in the top 5 percent of its genre. It is cheaper than 74 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 89 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark ($29.99, scores 75) beats it on value, while it beats Kingdom Heroes 8 ($29.99, scores 0).
More about Populous™: The Beginning
Of the 351 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 8 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2024 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 9 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,866 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 209 have a larger share. The typical game sits near 5 in 1,000, so the score docks it. 1 of the 8 refunded reviewers was past Valve's two-hour window when they wrote the review. Inside the two-hour refund window, 82 percent of the 199 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 46 percent of everything written about it.
Players
- Players online
- 18 when we last checked, on Oct 16, 14:55 UTC
Player counts from the Steam Web API.
What players say
I used to love playing this game years ago, it is just as fun as I remember. What an amazing game, they don't make them like this anymore.
2 more reviews
Still old... BUT THE RTS IS HERE! The multiplayer was supposed to be quite good, and the space solar system thingy is pretty cool. Quite a fun game.
I grew up with this game, first played it on the playstation 1 long ago, lots of good memories playing this especially the funny english voiceover on the ps1.
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Populous™: The Beginning scores 72/100 on the BANG Score (worth it) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/2616430/populous-the-beginningReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 29, price as of Oct 19. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.