Spore has been out for quite some time now. I haven't really got around to writing about what i feel about the game. A short introduction of what Spore is:
Spore is Will Wright's next game after The Sims. It is a evolution simulator of sorts where the player controls a microbial cell up to a space farring civilisation. It has been touted to be a game that is very easy to pick up and play. Its big feauture is the creature creation tool where the player can create their creature with ease and with a lot of freedom.
The game features editors that allow the player to build all sorts of assets for your own game. Spore is a game that depends on community made assets and recives these from the sporepedia, and online repository of these assets. You can rate them and comment on them just like in youtube. All very web 2.0 and taking advantage of the whole social networking fad.
The game is divided with five stages, the cell stage where you control a cell, the creature stage where your cell evolves legs and takes to land, the tribe stage where your creature groups up with a bunch of other creatures and starts a tribe, the civilisation stage your creature build a city and the space stage where you lift off into space and travel the cosmos.
The cell stage plays like a pac man game. you control your cell towards your food(either meat or planktons) and in this stage you define what you eat. This stage is very arcady and simple to play. Tha game looks very nice in this stage and it is very cool when you see really huge cells in the background as you continue to grow.
The creature stage you travel on land, have a creature nest, you need to eat or befriend other creatures depending whether your creature is a herbivor, omnivor or carnivour. The social game is just a simon says like game where you must mimic the movements of the other creature.
Once you have evovled enough, you group together to form a tribe. In this stage, the game plays like a very simple RTS. You collect food to heal and feed your tribes. You can also befriend other tribes by playing musical instruments. The social mechanic in the tribes stage is not very engaging. Playing aggresively makes the game a bit too easy as you just need to zerg rush your enemies everytime and outnumber them or just aim for their main hut.
The civilisation stage you build factories that make spice(the currency in game), entertainment outlets that make your creatures happy and houses that also make your creatures happy and increases the population limit. The city building mechanic is extremely simple and cant be compared to sim city. Its just a matter of connecting the happy building to nuetralise the building that make your creatures unhappy. You also build vehicle in this stage to make war, preach religion to cenvert cities, or economic units to trade with other cities.
Depending on how you played so far, you will be facing different civilsations that may be religious, economic or war like in mentality. They objective is to conquer everyone(either by peace or war) and unify the planet. I found this stage to be like a RTS that still is simpler than most RTS's but more deeper than the tribe game. The AI in this stage impresses me as they seem to know their priorities and assess the situation to know who is their biggest threat and diplomatically stays peaceful if they feel you aren't a threat yet.
Once you have unified the planet, you design your spaceship and take to space. In space, the game opens up and it is extremely HUGE! The main goal of the game is to get to the center of galaxy. Space is very beautiful from nebulae's to all sorts of planets and stars, it is a sight to behold. It plays a bit like a simple real time version of Master of Orion or Gal Civ. You can be playing in this stage for a very long time.
After going through each stage, what stood out the most was that the amount of content you created was absolutely amazing. From your creatures, vehicle to buildings, they are all customisable and the other creatures, buildings and all were created by someone else. It was a joy to discover new creatures that looked bizarre and leave a comment about it on the sporepedia page(which is built in the game). The amount of flexibility afforded by the editor is amazing and is a real technical feat.
The gameplay part however is a bit underwhelming. If you play strategy games and are a hardcore PC gamer, you will find Spore a bit too shallow. It does get a bit long in the tooth after a while.While I can appreciate the amount of creativity from other spore users and the absolute brilliance in how we could share all this content in game, the game falls shorts of expectation especially with the amount of hype built up for it.
To be fair, they have never said it to be a complex game and has been saying each stage is a simple version of a particular genre. Still this is a bit of a culture shock for most PC gamers. It is more like a casual game in this regard. The technology and inovation in the web element, sharing and editors amazing, the game not so much.
I cant help feeling that they cut out a lot of game elements from the final game because they felt it would make the game more complex. I have no doubt that EA will spew out expansions after expansions and after all these Spore will probably have more depth and be the game it should be. But for now it falls a little short.
DRM Note : Spore has an online Securom authentication that limit the number of times you can install the game(five right now). You will require an internet connection to install the game. EA has released a deauthorisation toll recently that you can download in the spore website that will allow you to deauthorise an install when you uninstall.
Retail Price : RM129
Availability : pcgame.com.my
The Software Boutique
Rating : 3/5
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