Darkspore Beta Preview - It’s Not Quite Diablo

In what was a surprise announcement, Darkspore was unveiled by EA middle of last year to much befuddlement. What was Darkspore? Was it a sequel to Spore? or an off shoot of some kind? Well it turns out that Darkspore is an action RPG in the veins of a Diablo. What’s weird with it is that it doesn’t have any association either in terms of storyline or gameplay with Spore. The only thing it carries with it are the space theme and a form of the creature creator.



It’s as if the guys at Maxis sent a letter to Will Wright that went something like this… ‘Dear, Mr. Wright, we would like to take the name of your game, Spore and make a video game the guys at the office would like to play. And you know Diablo is pretty popular. We reckon we should do one. PISS OFF SPORE!’. And so began the Diablo Spore project that aimed to make all gamers rejoice at the gaming goodness that was Darkspore. Well that was the dream. The story is mildly interesting.

Choose your heroes. Group them into squads

Apparently, the crogenitors were an advanced civilisation that had a large galactic empire. They knew a lot about genetic research and figured out how to make their very own ‘genetic heroes’. But the discovery of ‘E-DNA’ went haywire as the self evolving genes took over any creature that came into contact with it, thus, creating 'the darkspore’. The crogenitors empire crumbled and the genetic heroes slaughtered by the darkspore. But a few survived, tucked away in cryogenic pods in space.

This is where you, the player, comes in. You start off having access to three genetic heroes and as you progress, you can unlock many more. These heroes(3 in a squad) are grouped into squads and you can only take one squad on a mission. You’ll want to make sure you’ve got a good mix of heroes in a squad(the usual tank, DPS unit etc) so that you’ll be better prepared.

This might seem familiar to you Spore players. It's the creature creator now re branded

Once past all the introductions, you’ll be dumped in the creature modification screen, which is basically the creature creator modified for Darkspore. You can do the usual elongate limbs, add visual decorations and such. There are also some items you collect in missions that you can equip your heroes with in this screen. These can modify the attributes of your hero much like how some parts in Spore modified your creatures attributes. And something called DNA points which you use to unlock new heroes.

Once you’ve made your creature look all pretty and powerful(you can do this anytime you’re out of a mission in your ships bridge), you start doing missions. These are organised into chapters that have some narrative/storyline element(this is the campaign basically). The missions themselves look the same and end in the same way. They all(at least the early few missions I played) end with a horde event which is pretty much an arena battle where waves of enemy come after you.

Diablo in Space! With cute cuddly creatures as bad guys! Where are the Space Ponies?

The only unique thing with Darkspore is the squad you get to use. Anytime during a mission, you can quickly switch to a different hero. This make playing coop a lot less frustrating as you can juggle different roles if one of your heroes fall(or your partners hero dies). Single player is an uninteresting affair as you just go around killing stuff and picking up loot. Which in other games might not be such a bad thing, but in Darkspore, I feel the loot is a bit harder to understand.

We all know that an Axe of Slicng +4 is an awesome weapon in an RPG or action RPG but just how useful is a Kreeta’s Demetrios Knee Guard is? This disconnect make the loot less interesting and less of a reward to keep you playing the game. It’s just completely uninspiring stuff. I could be wrong of course and this is after all a beta. They could improve things dramatically(the beta only has the first 10 chapters) in the final build, but I’m not quite convinced.

At the end of a mission, the game roles a reward for you. I think you chances of getting a rare loot is increased the better you do in missions.

Darkspore has the usual online ‘sporepedia’ feature that has been renamed and retooled now as the Helix computer. Here, you can view your friends heroes, their stats and worldwide leaderboards. It’s now more about the competitive aspect rather than the creative expression of the player like it was in Spore. Darkspore is a weird game. EA Maxis are not known for making games like these. And it is quite telling in the beta in my opinion. Darkspore will be out on March 29th.

DISCLAIMER: As with all beta versions, it is bound to change. The opinion expressed here are only about the current beta build which is no where near final and is subject to change.