Review

Spore

Maxis is the undisputed king of simulation entertainment. Everything from being mayor, to tycoon, or just the queen of the hill brings many fond and nostalgic memories. With lofty goals to simulate the circle of life, will Spore be worthy for a place in the stars or is it destined to burn up on re-entry?

Expectations have been high for Spore since is announcement.  But, boiled down it’s not an opus. It’s not the golden child. It is a marvel of technology and ingenious design. As a game though, it is not worth the hype. Comprised of an amalgam of game styles with a general lack of focus, given time it could become polished. Being that other developers have already made products having that slick, shiny finish to most of the game styles present, that precious time would be wasted. To make things worst, the best and most innovative game element was released months in advance of the full game. Considering it was free or a fraction of the “full” game’s cost doesn’t help. For all it’s faults Spore does what every game should aspire to and just happens to end up an average game.

Spore splits life up into five distinct phases, including cell, creature, tribal, civilization, and space, leaving all but the last phase feeling squelched and under loved. Before even starting the game you’re given the choice of herbivore or carnivore. Which will weakly define how you choose to play the game. Herbivores are distinctly pacifistic, only feeding on helpless plants while carnivores kill everything in sight (there is a possibility to be an omnivore which allows a player to randomly jump sides on a whim). This binary play style will hold true up through the civilization stage. I’d recommend choosing carnivore as playing the pacifist is just being masochistic as your creature will die over and over just sitting there taking it like a dunce.

Upon a rock falling from the sky the cell phase will start. It’s nothing but a simple minigame at best. Giving your cell the ability to ram into objects and either eat or be eaten by them until you’re too big for the kiddy pool. All the while gathering parts along the way.

The Creature phase then quickly drops your blob now hooked up with some legs onto land. Then you’re tasked with randomly finding parts (to upgrade your creature) strewn across the ground as if your creature was in the world of Legos. Along this long quest to find the perfect parts, your creature will either befriend or kill off every other species in sight which in turn gains you even more parts and “build” cap to play with. After eating massive amounts of fodder and sinew, the game will advance to the tribal stage. This stage has you control your now intelligent creatures en masse to wage war on neighboring tribes. The gameplay starts to crawl at this point (luckly it’s a short experience).

Moving to the civilization phase turns the game a resource race to allow domination of every city on the planet. After this short trip to full domination the race then kicks itself into he expansive beyond. With a few tutorials to help learn the goings on and the interface Spore just lets go. There is a small goal to reach the center of the galaxy but it really doesn’t do anything, leaving your spaceship to just do whatever it wants. In good form the space phase grants more and more gameplay options via “badges” for playing the game in certain ways. Doing missions, terraforming planets, establishing colonies, advancing species, it all leads to something more to do until your race is powerful enough to make and reshape other life forms. Then you can make sentient races to befriend, trade, betray, play war, or just plain ignore. With so MUCH to do there’s bound to be at least one thing that is fun. The only downside is that a lot of actions are linked strongly to the spore currency so to do what you love invariably means you’re stuck doing something you’d rather not a lot more often.

All through these phases various versions of the creature creator pop up to allow endless hours of building, rebuilding, refining, and scrapping designs to find that sweet spot that tickles your fancy. The sad part is that everything from buildings to the creatures aren’t really enhanced nominally, regardless of how they are built. There are little things like making the creature tall enough to reach all types of food and good limb placement makes for efficient walk cycles. But really, even without good design the creatures will waddle through. This is even truer for buildings and vehicles, making the “creature elements” a little more than ego stroking and custom character skins.

Gameplay is really all there is to talk about in this game. The graphics are procedural so, while interesting and void of frame rate issues, they aren’t stellar. Spore’s sound quality isn’t great either as most sounds are rather grating (especially the voices of alien races in the space phase). Thank the Maxis Gods that there’s a special volume setting bar to mute all that chitter. Music is rather absent or so ambient that it’s never noticed. The interface is so forgiving and simple that making something good or interesting becomes surprisingly easy. As for the controls, the combat is ghastly and in the space age the game continually forces it on you. For everything else the interface is usually just a mouse click away but having no actions able to be hot keyed is a pain, as all the actions are hidden away in a slow responding tabbed menu of buttons.

When it’s all said and done the game only takes about 10 hours to complete the final objective. Getting all the badges and skills will add to the clock quite a bit but is only worth it if those gameplay elements are fun to you. Like it’s Simcity predecessor if you don’t like building cities it gets old fast, as will flying around in space and building habitable planets if it’s not your cup of tea. Overall, Spore is a game that everyone should put a little time into if nothing else but to experience it. As to buying it to play, it’s probably better just to leech off a friend for a few hours if nothing more than to make a few of your own brand of Frankenstein’s Monster.