Will Wright's Spore

Well, I've been playing Spore for about 15-20 hours now (I tend to lose track of time), and I think I've played enough of it to give a solid review. Let me start by saying that I've been looking forwards to Spore for nearly three years now (enough to give it a mention in this article on new videogame developments), and so I've had very high expectations of the game. Perhaps I even wanted to enjoy it to the point where I was kidding myself that I was having fun. With that negative little disclaimer aside, Evis T's review of spore:

The Basic Premise

Spore is a "God Game" concept taken to a whole new level. Think the Sims meets civilization, and you won't go far wrong for what Will Wright was aiming for. The game also features a very good creator system that lets you design your own vehicles, buildings, and even your own species.

Gameplay

You start spore as a single celled micro organism.You eat and grow, collecting body parts and then birthing a new generation of creatures that are "upgraded" using the parts you've found. New parts are purchased with DNA points, which can be gained by selling existing body parts, or by eating. It plays a lot like most online casual games- it's simple, quick and sweet.

Using the evolutionary ideas of the micro organism phase, the game then switches to world of Warcraft. No, seriously the "creature" stage (where you are still a mindless animal), plays almost exactly like WoW. You click things to select them, and then click an action in a task bar to interact with them, moving around with the WASD keys. In all fairness, the system works well for the game at this stage, so I won't hold it against it.

You control one creature and the game is basically the same (Eat, collect parts, evolve, repeat), but now takes on a new dimension (Literally) as you are no longer playing in a 2D world, but a full 3D landscape. The idea is the same though, although now you can also charm other creatures into being your allies instead of killing everyone. It's fun, but even a mediocre adventure game is better.

Next is the tribal stage. This plays a lot like the RTS Age of empires. You control a tribe; you construct buildings at your camp and gain new building options for conquering or allying with other tribes. You also need to collect food for your tribe to sustain it, and to create new units. Again, it's not bad at all, but it's missing some depth and it's over pretty quickly. Play something like Age Of Empires if you like this sort of thing.

Spore then moves on to the civilization stage. Here your planet is now populated by one race (yours), and using either religious, economic or military means, you need to conquer every last city on the planet (I used military means, and then what was left got nuked with a mass ICBM strike). Like all the previous sections, it plays well, has no real flaws and it's pretty fun. But it's just missing some depth that would be present in almost any RTS game. That little something that isn't there and drives you nuts because you can't quite figure out what, specifically, it is…

Finally, you get the space stage. Unfortunately, there is where the game takes a real nose dive. The lack of depth in all the previous sections of the game is understandable (If irritating), but given how much publicity there's been on the space age section of spore (Including Will Wright describing the rest of the game as a "tutorial"); it has a lot to answer for. Basically, you fly your UFO around the cosmos, meeting and interacting with species a lot like the civilization games. You can establish trade routes (which are useless), make them your allies (Almost useless), conquer them (Which is tedious and hard), or trade with them (even more dull than combat, but about all they're useful for).

I think even the die hard fans of the game will agree that the following things are very wrong with the space age section:

• Trade routes do not generate cash. All they do is let you buy the system you are trading with, and buying systems is so expensive it's not worth it anyway.
• When you're doing something fiddly like terraforming and you have to abandon the task to go and deal with some random pirate attack
• Random attacks by the Grox. They are very hard to kill, and attack too frequently.
• The only way to make money is to manually load your ship up and trade. It was dull in EVE online, and it's even worse here. Why wasn't there an option to automate this, or incorporate it into the trade routes?
• Combat goes one way or the other VERY quickly. Either you and your allied ships are forced to withdraw (or get blown up) in 30 seconds, or the enemy falls over when you cough. It's so frantic though that often you loose just because you couldn't see what was going on. A slower paced, more directed battle rather than a click frenzy would be far more enjoyable.
• Let us take units with us when we attack. Enemy UFOs always seem to have swarms of fighters with them, why can't we? The only way I get allies is by using my super power, or by paying off one of my allies to attack the system. Can't we beam troops down the planet to take the colonies over?