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?

These 6 issues just won’t stop nagging as I’m playing the game. They could be so easily sorted (here’s to hoping there’s a patch!), and they’re not massive gaping flaws. The problem is they pop up so often that after 45 minutes in the space age I turned the game off and played super Mario DS instead.

The Space Age Felt Like a Chore

As for the rest of the game, it’s all good to middling. Dedicated games have done what spore did in each “stage” a lot better, but that’s not the point. The way each age is linked is really cool, and decisions that you make early in the game effect things later -for example, carnivores tend to become more militaristic in the civilization stage. Still though, the lack of depth does bug you, and spore’s little quirks and entertaining tidbits wear off after a while. I’ve played through the game up to the animal stage twice, thinking the second time I played I might have more fun as I understood the game better. Sadly, the opposite was true. Now I knew what I was doing it simply became a choice of whether I impress this pack, or kill them. Repeat for an hour. Go to tribe… Ugh.

I think the big issue is that this game has been in development for Five years. Five years, and this was all they could come up with? The framework is here for a fantastic game, but there’s no real content. There’s nothing to do. Everything plays and feels the same. Oh you can argue that playing with a different creature changes the game entirely, but you’d be fooling yourself. Herbivore, carnivore, Military, Religious, at the end of the day, they all do the same thing and have the same effect.

The Creature Creator

This is the one part of Spore I really can’t say anything bad about. The creature creator is a masterpiece, and fun to boot. It’s so simple to use a child could do it, it’s limiting enough that you have to think about what you’re making. But at the same time you never think “I can”t make that using this tool’, and nine times out of ten if you can picture it in your head, you can make it. The creatures you create behave correctly, and while I always get this nagging feeling at the back of my head that certain bipeds are so obviously overbalanced they can’t walk, I will happily admit this is nit picking. And the game does reward intelligent design (Snigger), by having well balanced and well designed creatures move far more fluidly than ungainly ones. You speed and effectiveness depends on the parts you use rather than how you build your creature (No stats based rewards for building the creature in a certain way), but it’s satisfying to see your creation move how you want it to.

The building and vehicle creators are also great fun, providing you with many options to throw together interesting and insane engineering feats. Although the feedback isn’t as great as the creature creator, you will still find yourself putting a lot of time and effort into designing your kit and importantly- it won’t feel like time wasted. The stats for vehicles don’t seem to make much of a difference to their performance, but then again as I said, depth isn’t really present here.

Graphics

Pretty. I think that sums up Spore’s graphics best. Pretty, but not fantastic. The whole cartoon like theme works very well, the engine handles your custom made creations with gusto. Animation is smooth and life like (provided your creature is life like), the planets are beautiful, the explosions and special effects are pleasant, and the frame rate never really dropped on me, even during massive UFO battles. All in all, I would call that damn fine. It’s not cutting edge graphics, but the style works really well for the game type.

Multiplayer

Spore doesn’t have multiplayer capability, but any creations you make can be shared with the rest of the world via EA’s spore server. When the game loads it will search for races and designs

and download a few chosen ones to your computer which you will then encounter. If you like a person’s work then you can go and check more of their stuff out on the spore website, and if you hate it then you can ban their content from your PC.

Seeing the stuff some people come up with renews your faith in human imagination, and the skill of some people in using the creature creator is truly laudable. Everything from the starship enterprise, to daleks, to sentient fruit can be found in the sporepedia. This is again testament to the unfortunate idea that perhaps the creature creator is what makes the game great, rather than being an add on to a great game…

Conclusion

Depth is something I’ve talked about a lot in this review, and something that I feel we where promised. Spore is not so much deep as it is broad. If you imagine a body of water, your average game covers a small area, but goes down deep. Spore covers a very wide area, but is very shallow. Granted, games that try to do a lot of things usually fall flat on their faces and Spore doesn’t (probably because it doesn’t try to do the whole lot at the same time by dividing the game into “phases”), but then again it’s hard to trip over when your crawling rather than walking. In short, spore doesn’t push itself hard enough, and that means while it is less likely to screw up, it won’t reach its full potential.

Each “age” in spore is imitating a genre, (Adventure for the animal stage, RTS for the Civilization stage and so on), but it never really does each attempt justice. Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than the space age. Most space empire games provide you with a myriad of options and ideas, and while spore has simplified that immensely, I think Will Wright forgot to question why so many space empire games are complicated to begin with- to keep players interested, and to give them something to actually do. I would have called spore “Good but not exceptional”, however the space age brings it down to “tedious and lacking substance”. Basically playing the final phase of the game accentuates all the other flaws in the previous sections of Spore.

The creature creator though is fantastic. All in all, I would say Spore is worth buying- once it’s come down to about £15-£20. It seems to have been the victim of hype that it couldn’t live up to. Maybe we just don’t have the technology yet, although I doubt it. I think spore rested too much on it’s laurels, relying on a consumer base who would buy it just because it was “interesting”, rather than creating an actual game. Until the price drops, avoid it unless you get the chance to play it for free (say at a friend’s house), at which point stop reading and go make up your own mind.

Overview

Graphics: 9/10 (Far from stunning, but suitable for the game type)

Sound: 8/10 (Music is well done, and the redneck style whooping when I launched an ICBM still makes me chuckle)

Game play: 6/10 (This is an average. If you take the space section out, pump it up to 7)

Fun rating: 7/10 (The creature creator takes this up from a 6, again the space age dragging down an otherwise higher average)

Multiplayer: 10/10 (I’ve yet to see anything on my screen that was offensive or obscene, and some things where simply masterpieces.)

Overall: 6/10

Spore is a patchy game at best, it needs some more substance. The space age was nothing but a disappointment and dragged the previous parts of the game down with it.

Even Giant space monsters know the Fonz! Ayyye!