Spore

A few years back, I heard a description of an upcoming game that allowed you to create and guide life in an unprecedented way and scope. You had complete control of your lifeform, from its humble beginnings as microbial life oozing through primordial goo, all the way up to a galactic civilisation. Now this is obviously caught my eye, so, once I was able, I dutifully went and bought Spore, for a bargain price thanks to some very friendly and infinitely dodgy game dealers in Bangkok.

Spore was developed by Maxis, who we all know are behind the various Sims games as well as the SimCity games. Love them or hate them, the Sim franchises are one of the most successful lines of computer software (not games) ever. While I despise the Sims, I did actually rather enjoy the various SimCity packages. So when I heard of a game that could mock the scope of the already very complicated and huge SimCity , I was very eager to get sucked into the vastness of it all.

Once I began the game, I knew I would be in for an interesting experience. The game starts with a galactic view, and you get to choose a planet on which to send your….spore shall we say. You get to decide on your lifeforms diet, be it carnivorous, herbivore or both. You are then treated to a nice little sequence where a meteor packed with microbial life impacts on a wet but sterile world. After the impact, all the meteoric fragments rain down into the sea, from which your cell emerges and begins life. You then must begin feeding in order to collect enough DNA to evolve. The primordial pool is a busy place, and you can eat on whatever or who ever passes by, its up to you.

I must say I really liked this part of the game. I have a particular soft spot for space opera, and I do firmly believe in the theory of Panspermia. So this was right down my alley. As you swim about eating on your chosen diet, you gather enough DNA until you can grow to the next stage. This is really cool, as you change size, the whole scale of everything around you changes too. When you first emerge from the meteor, you nibble on passing single cell plants and animals, but as you grow, they become too small to be worth the effort and you move onto bigger prey. There are many things that will eat you too, they are usually much bigger and faster so you really have to try to avoid them. As you swim about, you can see huge creatures moving around in the background, These are too big to even notice you, so the game really gives you a cool and well thought out view of the microscopic world.

As I mentioned above, as you gather more DNA, you get to grow and evolve. When this happens, you can call for a mate, and you go to the creature creation screen. Here you get to spend your DNA on upgrading your critter so it can be more effective at its chosen lifestyle. Extra wiggly bits to move faster, spines and poison emitters for defence, the list goes on. So once your happy with your creation, you can hatch from your egg and begin life with your new features. This is a cool little concept and I feel it works well. You can always go back and look at all the stages of evolution you have chosen, so you get a view of how your cell has evolved and improved since its first tentative wiggles out of the meteor.

After a while, you gain enough DNA for your creature to evolve a primitive brain. Once this happens, your critter can then take its first steps on land, and thus the Creature Stage of the game begins. You evolve legs and begin to explore this vast new world you find yourself on. As before, your choice of diet remains, so you move off into the surrounding jungle to see what you can find. You will inevitably come across some other creatures and you can either eat them or befriend them, both giving you different amounts of DNA depending on their size or stage of evolution. Again this is used to change and grow you creature as it steadily evolves towards sentience.

Unfortunately, the game begins to struggle a bit here. While it is fun to evolve you creature, running around eating fruit from trees isn’t quite as exciting as you would think. This stage is boring and repetitive. As I said there is some fun to be had, but it seems as if the designers ran out of ideas. All of the creatures are ground based. There is some limited flying but that’s it. You cant climb, swim, burrow or use most of the interesting things on the landscape. The fighting is crap, with a maximum of only 4 attacks that don’t really look that good. Some of the offensive weapons are useless and I found myself sticking to the same really powerful attack while ignoring the others. The befriending is even worse. There is nothing cool about watching you hulking armoured monster doing a gay dance to try befriend a randomly generated creature that looks like an orange baby with 4 legs, called a BeebleBee.. Bah!

The creature editor is fun I must say. There is a lot of potential for a near infinite array of critters. There is also endless possibility for abuse and making some strange and completely nonsensical ones like below. However this is not enough to save Spore as, like in the cell stage, you eventually get enough DNA to become sentient, and so begins the tribal stage. Once you reach this point, you can no longer edit your creature, so the game effectively locks out one of its most fun elements.

The Tribal Stage, like the creature stage, feels unfinished. The scale moves up again, now you are on a whole continent with other villages of recently intelligent creatures scattered about. There is nothing like what you can do in any other building simulator. The rules are somewhat confusing, your village is tiny and you only have a couple of different things you can do. Again it is a choice between good and bad, or force and diplomacy. It’s a bit annoying in one aspect as the physical strengths of your creatures are removed and all of the enemy tribes have the same health as you. So the before mentioned Beeblebees can now take down my brutes with a club or spear, whereas in the creature stage I could have taken out their whole nest with one critter.

Your village can be upgraded, as can your costume, but even when it is fully upgraded, your tribe can only have 12 members, 8 huts and one livestock creature. The costume aspect is pointless as has no impact on your creatures behaviour or strengths. You cant even add all of the buildings you unlock at once, as of the 10 or so buildings, there is only 8 permanent unmoveable spots in village you can build on. It seems the sentience has done little to improve the game. So once you’ve defeated or befriended the other tribes, the game moves to the City Stage…yay.

Again, it is cumbersome and irritating. The city stage brings the scale up to a planetary perspective. You have your home city and you have to either conquer or subsume the other cities on the world. There are a few different ways you can do this. By military conquest, religious conversion or economic means. You also have access to a navy and air force. Money is gathered by controlling Spice geysers (Maxis you have no shame) which gathers at a rate dependant on how many geysers you poses. Now I know your thinking this sounds a lot better, but believe me its not. The military conquest is too easy, but still manages to frustrate. Your units do nothing to defend themselves and will sit still while firing, making it impossible to avoid enemy fire, not that moving around makes any difference anyway. All of the weapon effects are identical regardless of what you have equipped. Their armour is weak, you can do nothing to upgrade them and all of your offensive units are the same design. It is similar with the religious conquest method. Its boring and easy. Economic victory is also fairly lacklustre, you simply set up a trade route and just wait until you have enough clout to buy an enemy city.

The one small decent part of city stage is the vehicle/building editor. This is cool I must say, you can design your buildings and vehicles in the same way as you could your creature. It would have been nice if the preset objects for building were a little mare varied, but there is enough there to come up with plenty of interesting ideas.

So once you take over the world, can you only guess whats next?? That’s right, the Space Stage. This is actually one of the better stages. You can colonise planets, make peace or war with other interstellar civilisations and even terraform worlds. You can fly to different solar systems and scan planets (I will not evoke the name of ME2 in this review), even abduct local lifeforms for study. This is a bit of fun, but I found some of the missions difficult to understand and complete, and honestly, after all the shit Iv had to go through to get to this stage, I wasnt that interested.

The graphics were hit and miss and could have been better, especially compared to other games out the same year, but were colourful and interesting. The cell stage looked great. Sound wise, there were some nice ambient sound effects, music nice, especially in the opening intro and in the primeval soup. Animal sounds were cool and realistic, but again a bit repetitive with the same sounds being recycled for most of the creatures. The usual Maxis gibberish found in their Sims series makes a return once your creatures have evolved to sentience.

Overall Spore was an awful disappointment. The cell stage was excellent, some really good visuals and very clever ideas regarding evolution and the concept of scale. Creature maker is lot of fun, as was vehicle/building designing, if a little restrictive. There are no major differences in the types of creatures available, i.e. insects, fish, reptiles etc, this would have been really cool if it had been included.

Creature stage was interesting but repetitive and ignored many survival strategies, swimming, climbing, which would have added much to the game. The fight/friend system was very basic and felt unfinished. The game should have been longer while making better use of the creature editor, it was too easy and quick to advance to the other stages. Once the tribal stage happens the game goes downhill. City building is crap, as is combat. The Space Stage was a bit better, but still felt lacking. So while Spore has some excellent ideas, it ultimately falls far short of the mark and squandered an excellent chance to be one of the greatest games (if it could be called a game) ever.