Don't Believe the Hype. The game is lacking many of the things that made the original great.
The creature is far less interesting and far less of an individual than the creature in the first black and white.
There is no free-play, skirmish, or sand box mode, only the campaign mode.
There is no multi-player, only a very poorly made and uninteresting campaign mode.
The game play is decent, the city building elements are just like dozens of other successful city building games. You harvest food, ore, and wood and use them to build buildings. You can train soldiers during missions to go capture towns and fight scripted AI soldiers, or you can just build up your city defenses and all of the towns will completely disperse and the villagers will all come to join your town, leaving you left with only one highly over populated town. If you want to build multiple cities on a map you have to capture them, which is considered evil.
The AI for Soldiers is terrible. They move at unrealistic speeds in ridiculous formations and often when moving to attack something new they swiftly flood back into a box squad and disperse. They don't naturally heal when damaged, so you have to heal them (making you good) and infantry can't do basic things like climb up into gate houses to attack archers on the walls. Your own archers do not form up on the wall very well.
Once you've built your city, there's really nothing to do but move on to the next land. You can't throw fire balls at your own people and Ore is typically too limited to build beyond a certain point without a scripting cheat (changing ore from Normal to Infinite).
There's no research in this game as advertised, instead you simply purchase upgrades from an in game shop called "tribute". Most buildings are not worth the cost, neither in tribute nor resources, and most will be inaccessible until after you have completed the game and started on a second playthrough with the same profile. There's no creature changer, unfortunately.
The land scape and buildings change as you become more good or evil. This is based on a technology from the original black and white, there are three skins and meshes and there is a scale between them, the more the scale slides in one direction the more dominate one mesh and skin becomes. We've already seen this in Fable and a few other games as well, it's impressive but it's just a gimmick without good game play. For some people the gimmick never gets old.