After years upon years of what seemed like constant waiting and being told it would just be another three months, thank you, Spore finally charges onto the market with a whole bunch of fire nipping at its heels. The flood of penis monsters, the anti-piracy software debacle, the threats of TV tie-ins, it seems like the game the world was finally ready for came into a world that wasn't all that interested anymore.
But game politics are only interesting to guys who play with spreadsheets all day. People who actually play games will see that it took that long to make because there are a lot of variables that needed to reconfigure and whatever. I mean, there is so much going on, you almost wish that you had a lot more control.
Find out what makes Spore almost worth the wait after the jump
Spore is actually six games in one. The five basic games, which take you from a single-celled nobody into a spaceship-driven galactic shaman, and the creation suite, which allows you create an insane number of different creatures and objects. Because each one plays differently and has its own highlights and faults, and because I've always wanted to rip off Lore Sjoberg one day, I'll be presenting each game with its own score, then given the entirety a score at the end.
Cell stage
You start the game crashlanding on the planet inside a meteor. That's right, our hero, the race that will eventually take over the planet, is actually an alien invader. What an interesting way to go with that, considering how easily it would have been to just raise a native to prominence, and it opens a lot of plot hole issues (where on planet do the other yous come from?) that could have been avoided. But anyway, meteor brings change, and change we will.
After choosing your food of choice (animal or vegetable), it's only a matter of swimming around the primordial ooze eating your heart out until you can start evolving. It's very simple, and plays exactly like it should. You eat, you grow, you adapt, and it's unfortunate that this part isn't going to take you more that 15 minutes, because it's the cleanest experience you'll have. It's Flash-level gameplay, sure, and no way you'd pay just for this (unless you own an iPhone), but it looks awesome, really setting the tone, and it's kind of unwelcome to be kicked out after only collecting 50 DNA points.
Rating: B+
Creature stage
This part is the game that most people know, the interesting bit, when you're a legged creature, wandering the Earth, um, planet, making friends and hunting for food. Race relations are apparently very important in the wilderness, as the only way to advance is to befriend or eat your fellow leggies. Oh, and all the creatures are nice enough to hang around their respective nest at all times, waiting to be entertained/devoured.
This part only saves itself with its collect-them-all tendencies. While you can explore a bit, there isn't going to be a lot you'll be doing. Walk to creature's nest, dance for them or attack them, rinse repeat. You will occasionally return to your nest to grow arms or get better teeth, and you will touch every fossil you find to get these upgrades, but by the time you have an effective creature who knows how to shake it or shake it up, you will be bored with running from nest to nest. Still, evolving your creature is fun, even if it turns out your favorite looking limb isn't effective at all and you keep on struggling to get that nice giraffe-like creature to like you.
Rating: B-
Tribal stage
Here's the part where it slows down a lot. Now that your creature is fully evolved (that's right, no more changes) it's time to put on clothes and pretend to act civilized. Here, the currency changes to food, which you have to collect to stay alive and purchase babies and buildings, and you are tasked with playing nice with other tribes that decided to put on hats.
The controls go to hell right about here, and the gameplay dries up like a sponge. You only have to chat or kill with five tribes to move on, a task that is easily achieved while you have your whole crew in tow, and there are only nine tools at your disposal total. The only thing that even requires tools is the social path, which requires you to once again entertain your neighbors in the most exciting minigame since Memory. It's dull and meddling, and only the cutscenes encapsulating this sorry chapter give it a small saving grace.
Rating: C
Civilization stage
Now it's time to Willy to shine, this is the kinda thing that made him what he was. Well, it was, once. It's now another portion of gameplay that doesn't feel nearly as played out as it should be. It's time to take over the world, mainly by driving your little cars to other cities and affecting them; by song, by cash, or by bullets. Each city is a little pocket of boring; each having only a town hall and a random assortment of three buildings to cause some kinda synergy…or something. From the man who made making cities fun, I expected a lot more.
Anyway, it's a simple matter of capping spice wells, then building up a small army of squad cars (and eventually squad planes) to drive up to other cities and do what they do. A task that can be accomplished in under an hour, give the unevenness of resources gained versus cost. The game even goes so far as to give you a 'win' button after you're far enough along to skip forward to the interesting part. The only thing likely to bog you down is creating every single car and building for all your cities. It's a part of the game that's best blasted through as quickly as possible.
Rating: C-
Space stage
Luckily we get to the pay-off. After millions of years of breeding, adapting, and bugging your neighbors about something, it's time to grab a spacecraft and take on the universe. A process that is every bit as fun and interesting as you expect it to be. The game finally slows down to an appropriate pace, the gameplay is thick and entertaining, and the options are limitless. It's obvious that all the rest of that nonsense was the hook, and this is the sinker.
As a commander of the only starship that's capable of actual reconnaissance in the galaxy, you travel from planet to planet, scanning for new life, finding ancient artifacts, trading different spices, fighting off space pirates, making war and peace with different empires, finding new colonies, and even changing the color of planets' atmosphere! There's a badge system that unlocks more goodies for you the more things you accomplish, and every empire is willing to give you a mission if you aren't currently trying to kill them. It's a fun space simulator that gets down to the depth we expected and provides the kind of vascular entertainment that comes from uprooting whole species and just plopping them on other planets, just to see what would happen.
Rating: A
Building
The sixth unofficial stage is the creation menu, where all the magic happens, supposedly. We were only promised that we'd make critters, but it turns out we'd be creating their buildings, vehicles, and spaceships as well. And while the customizability is staggering, it also starts the wear a bit. The only part where you're actually limited by some other factor than your vivid imagination is creature creation, but it turns out such restrictions are actually a good thing, as it prevents you from becoming too bogged down by options.
While the snap-in-place and instant coloring works beautifully for helping anyone create a creature, you're also rigidly defined to symmetrical creatures and vehicles. While a vast majority of all creatures are symmetrical, and we design our vehicles with the same intent, it would have been nice to have the option to misplace an object here and there, to make some true monsters. Sadly, buildings aren't forced symmetrical, so you can go all Frank Lloyd if you want, but if you want to make something more conventional, give up hopes of keeping your windows straight. Overall, it's wisely created, but not nearly sophisticated enough to really explore design.
Rating: B
So how does Spore work as a whole? Pretty well, especially with all the gizmos and oddities that comes with the interlinking part of the game. Your characters and creations are all loaded into a database somewhere, which then spews those back out into other galaxies, so your creature may be getting the spotlight in some other player's game in Minnesota. As luck would have it, my race is actually a major player in one of my friend's galaxies, which involved a civil war, splintering, and eventual annihilation of the rogue contingent. I always wish there was some way to hand that back across, because that's a lot more interesting than what my empire is actually doing.
Of course, each game is just single player, because controlling all of that over such a grand scale would be damn impossible, but it's good to know that it's a game that tries some sense of universal creation. My own universe is littered with other people's crazy critters and buildings, and knowing that the game will evolve itself over time is refreshing in a theoretical way.
But it's still a bit of a chore, and no amount of philosophical whatsit can save the monotonous gameplay and awkwardly strict methodology. You can create a lot of things, sure, but when you see your unique design showing up in your galaxy, apparently created by trogdor47, it takes the wind out of your sails a bit. Not to mention with all the debacle that surrounds the title, it was easy to get a little too excited and be a bit disappointed.
Still, this is the next step of simulation games, and now that the die is cast, we can really open up and see what trying things is all about. It doesn't have the fluidness or repose of Wright's older games, but it's still creative, fun in most places, and has a bit of the "what if" appeal. While the inevitable sequel will be better (then start to get subsequently worse over the years), for what it was trying to be, it proves that there's still room for exploration even after we know so much.
Final Score: B+
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