Spore Review
A game that fails at being an actual game? I’m talking about Spore, a game that took years to develop and got hyped to hell and back. Is failing at being a game such a sin though? For those who don’t know, Spore is Will Wright’s project, the guy who also created The Sims, EA’s cash cow. Just like The Sims, Spore is aimed at a large audience, which might partially explain why it doesn’t quite live up to the hype and fails at being a real game.
In Spore you get to play God, more or less. A meteor crashes into the planet of your choosing and you take control of a cellular organism, following the evolution theory road straight into space. Right from the start you have complete freedom regarding your creature, you can make it look like you want and you can make it eat what you want, be it flesh, vegetables or both. Your first choice will automatically determine if your creature becomes a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore in the next stages, so you have to choose carefully. The main thing you’re doing is feeding; by feeding you gain DNA points which you can use to buy new body parts. New body parts will make your life a little easier, by allowing you to swim faster or to be more agile, enabling you to evade the predators that want to eat you, or to catch your own prey more quickely. As you gain more DNA you will grow in size, until you eventually sprout legs, ready to hop right into the next phase. The problem with the Cell phase is that it’s too short, and there’s almost no challenge. If you get eaten you just get reborn – there is no penalty or anything. To give you an idea, it will probably take 10 to 15 minutes to play through the first phase. In contrast, the Cell phase is also available for the Ipod, which is a lot more challenging and has more depth to it then the PC version, easily taking five times longer to complete.
To keep the game straightforward and simple, EA divided Spore into five different phases. From the Cell phase you proceed to the Creature phase, and here is where the game really starts to fail. Your new species sets foot on land and the quest for more DNA starts all over again. Instead of eating algae or another cellular organism, you eat real vegetables or other animals just like yourself. Once again after gaining enough DNA you look for a mate, so you can reproduce and set the next step into your evolution. With your new body parts you can improve your fighting characteristics or you can add body parts that let you recruit other species by impressing them with your new body features. By recruiting creatures you also gain DNA and the creatures will follow and assist you when fighting for example. Throughout the creature phase you can have more creatures follow you, and depending on how aggressive or peaceful you behave you will determine what kind of culture your species is developing. This doesn’t sound too bad in theory, but in reality it’s the shallowest mini-game you could possibly think of. You’re simply button bashing the same two or three buttons until you can finally move onto the next phase. The challenge is, well, there is none, it’s just too easy. The only fun part is messing around with your creature. Because that’s the one thing Spore does get right – the creature creator which stands miles apart from everything you’ve ever seen before.
