If you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, allow me to bring you up-to-date on a little game called Spore.
A long time ago, the great and powerful Will Wright announced this game to the masses. Since that faithful day, loyal fanboys have been foaming at the mouth and dreaming of the possibilities this grandiose and revolutionary game would bring to their lives.
Spore has finally released, and what is the reaction out there on the internet? Meh. What’s my reaction? You can find out, after the break!
Spore is one of those games where it’s trying to do a lot, while not doing anything particularly well. In case you didn’t know, the gameplay in Spore is split up in 5 stages: Tide Pool, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and finally, the Space Stage. Because of the nature of the game and the widly different gameplay you can find in each stage, I’m going to sum up my thoughts of the stages one by one. Let’s start with the first one, shall we?
- Tide Pool Stage
When you start a brand new game in Spore, you start in the Tide Pool, where all life on the planet begins. The gameplay is akin to Pacman, or even more like Feeding Frenzy if you’ve played that. You lead your tiny creature around, attacking the other cells for meat (or new parts) or just looking for some tasty green goop to eat if you’re an herbivore. The gameplay itself here is fine and the stage won’t last too long (as long as you don’t die too much). Pretty soon you’ll sprout a pair of legs and swagger up to the surface.
- Creature Stage
So you’ve got a pair of legs, now what? Well now it’s time to evolve into a sentient creature and begin your conquest for global domination.
The Creature Stage’s gameplay is easily my favorite. In falls in line with something like World of Warcraft or Diablo, where you’re going around to the different camps of other creatures and either making buddy buddy or attempting to push their race to extinction. As you eradicate the different creatures (or make friends with them), you gain access to more parts to build your creature with, and even the ability to travel the landscape with a group of your allies. This makes forced extinction a group event!
There is a problem with this stage and the ones following it, though. That problem is that it’s way too short. For the first time through, it might take you a good bit of time. On other playthroughs, you could probably push through it quite quickly. This is where I think the Spore ball falls short of the basket. Even on Hard mode, the length was pretty much the same. I would have loved to have seen an Extended Mode or something along those lines where you could be given additional objectives, or stretched out the unlockables to allow for more creatures to exterminate (or make friends with).
Any way, once you dominate the lowly creatures, your Race forms together and you advance to the next stage on the next page!
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Yep, everything is explorable.
I kind of feel like you missed out on the initial fun of the Cell Stage, when you get to tweak your creatures to survive in the best way possible, while still eating things up.
Also, I found the Creature Stage quite repetitive, and all of the game up to the Space Stage was like a sort of prologue for me.
Anyway, fun game, not incredibly brilliant or anything, but eh, still great fun.
Actuallt I felt the Cell stage was more akin to Flow.
The game was so over hyped and in the end it did not live up to it. But the idea is so great that hopefully more titles will be based on this concept.
I’m still boycotting it cause of the DRM :p