Fancy yourself as a god?
Spore is the latest creation from Will Wright – the mind behind the Sims series of games, but when you buy Spore you’re not just buying one game, you’re buying five of them in one. While this is one of the things that makes Spore great but is also its downfall.
Spore is certainly an ambitious game. Fans of the Sims will be well acquainted with micro management, but not on this sort of scale. Players start out as a microscopic organism floating about in the sea eating plant matter or meat depending on wether you chose to be a herbivore or carnivore. Eating gives you DNA points which help you grow, and as you grow you can evolve your organism by adding spikes, flagella, “jet” propulsion, poison glands etc to help you defend yourself, move around faster, and attack others. To evolve your creature you must find a mate and can then enter the creator to change parts, and your choices in this stage of the game will influence what abilities are available later on.
The second phase of the game comes when your creature has evolved to the point it now has legs and has to establish itself on land. You are still able to influence the look of your creature in this stage adding arms and legs, spikes, scales, scorpion-style stingers etc with different “attachments” giving you different skills. In the previous “tide-pool” phase your only goal was to evolve out of the water, but now you must start interacting with other creatures. Do you want to make friends or fight? Either way you must now work your way to being the dominant creature on the planet.
Next is the “tribal” phase. Your evolution is now complete and you are top of the food chain. You no longer control a single creature but a tribe of them. This stage of the game is a sort of “light” RTS where you must gather resources and build up your settlement, then either befriend or kill all other settlements on your continent. Once you have established yourself the game moves on to the “civilization” stage. Here you will get a shot at the creator again and must plan and build your city, gather resources, build up an army, navy and air force, and then take over the world. Wether you do this by force or by religious conversion is up to you. Once the world is under your control it’s time to reach for the heavens and enter the space age, seeking out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go… Ok enough of that.
The space stage is by far the largest part of the game and that is part of the problem with Spore. The first 4 stages just seem to fly by and really just feel like watered down clones of other games, then the space stage comes along and although it is huge it is also rather simplistic in that you keep doing the same things over and over again. The basic aim of the game is to find your way to the centre of the universe, but as you are just a new-start on the space scene with a limited range on your drive, you’re going to have to work to get there.
seeking out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go… Ok enough of that.
Wether you choose to blast your way there or terraform worlds to expand your empire, you’re going to need cash which means either trading or doing missions. Both of these are fun to begin with but soon get tedious and repetitive. Completing missions, colonising worlds and exploring will all earn you different types of badges, and more badges mean more upgrades become available to buy from your friendly neighbourhood alien trader.
One of the major problems of the space stage is that it is very easy to find yourself completely overwhelmed by events. I found that very early on in one of my games I had a demand from an alien race for a huge sum of money or they would be at war with me, but having only just got into space I had nowhere near that kind of cash and had to refuse. This led to a situation where I simply could not go and explore/terraform/complete missions as I was constantly being recalled to defend my homeworld. There is simply too much to do, and although this is not in itself a bad thing, it is incredibly annoying when you are constantly receiving transmissions telling you that you are needed in opposite corners of the galaxy. Another problem with the space stage is the lack of autosaving. Well actually there’s no autosaving at all, but the problem becomes most apparent in the space stage as it is quite easy to get carried away and play for hours, only for Spore to crash and leave you looking at your desktop with the sudden realisation that you forgot to make a save recently. Its happened to me twice so far and it is heartbreaking to see all your hard work disappear like that.
One final mention goes to the “sporepedia” which is really quite nifty. Basically anything you see on your travels gets added to the sporepedia where you can go back and check it all out later. If you’re connected to the internet then user created content will get uploaded/downloaded through this too, allowing it to appear in your game. In fact I’ve not told him yet, but I already wiped out the “Spikeys” in one of my games – the creature created by the owner of this site, as they kept asking me for money 🙂 (You git!!, Dave)
Overall I am left slightly disappointed by Spore. It promised so much but the creature creation stage felt far too short, the tribal/civilization stage felt empty and the space stage is the only part with any real depth, but then goes over the edge into being perhaps a bit too deep. It is great evolving your creatures and following their progress into space, but once you’ve done it once I don’t see any reason to do it again when you can just start at the space stage with a fresh creature that you can make in the creator before you start. If you’re a creative person then you’ll most likely love being able to create buildings and vehicles as well as creatures, but even people like me with no artistic talent at all can have fun doing it even if we’ll never come up with anything like some of the masterpieces out there. Summing up, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have fun playing Spore, but at the same time I can guarantee you will find a number of things about it that will frustrate you no end.
The Bad: First 4 stages are too short and shallow, No autosave
