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Spore

Reviewed on: PC
Available on:

One of Matt's most anticipated games for the year makes it potentially the bggest disappointment. So does EA's Creature Feature deliver, or is it a let down?

Players:
Genre: Simulation
Release: 2008-09-04

Developer: Maxis
Distributor: EA

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I've been looking forward to Spore more than pretty much any other game (but Little Big Planet) this year. So when a review copy arrived I grabbed it quicker than Lindsay Lohan getting out of rehab and dashed home to play.

I'd forgotten about PC Games. I don't really play many. I mean, there's World of Warcraft and then... what else do you need? I bought a Dell XPS laptop specifically so I'd have a competent gaming PC to review PC titles on. But I very rarely actually install any. And yeah, that's the main thing I'd kind of forgotten. You have to install them, don't you? Man, they take AGES. I mean... people bitch about a few minues for PS3 games to install, on the few that actually do that. It's not like a PC game, though. I knitted a beanie while I was waiting. I had to learn to knit, too. Took some classes, made a few friends... We kind of drifted apart, but we still keep contact. All while waiting for it to install.

Spore - The grandest scope ever seen in a game. A bad game.

The game itself is fun. From the intro videos and menus to the actual game, it screams polish. Everything is brightly coloured and fun and kind of "big".

Spore is divided into 6 different Stages, with the first two setting up your "Creature" for the latter stages. You can only really build the dude at these first stages, and then it's locked in. It seems to me that each stage needs to be reviewed separately, in a way, or at least detailed separately. There's very little comparison between stage 1 and stage 5.

1. Cell Stage - The Cell stage isn't really a cell, that's a mistake. It's a multicellular organism. "Small" might have been a better term, but hardly catchy.

Once ready to start your single/multi cellular organism you are pretty straight away playing. No long intros, no tedium. Playing is simple. Your first choice is herbivore or carnivore. The first time I wanted to opt for a non-predator and have a leisurly play, so I went for a herbivore. The second I chose a carnivore. The play experience is relatively similar both ways, though.

Not unlike flOw in "feel" and gameplay Spore's first stage is really stunningly pretty, very well detailed, bright and bold. It's a lot of fun, growing your creature through ranks of sizes as you eat and eat, engorging yourself. It's strange seeing other versions of you, but cool. There's a major difference between the early creature of Spore and flOw, though - flOw is really kinda boring. Spore is not.

It's actually surprisingly soon and with mild sadness that you take the first step of your evolution - going onto land. It's strange, though. It's like you have cheated, like you're not finished yet, but at the same time you feel like you're "done here".

The Cell stage is fun, but it feels like a diversion. It's best to just move on and really start getting into it.

Cell Stage - You're not actually a "cell" though

2. Creature Stage - this is the bulk of crafting your animal, after it's taken on legs (just two) and wandered onto the land.

You run around, and meet new species, bond with or exterminate them. In the interface you have two "stances". Social and Combat. Both give you access to a range of abilities, depending on what parts you have. A particular mouth might increase your ability to Sing, for example, while spikey new hands enable Strike.

When you meet a new creature type you may choose how to interact with them. If you wish to be social, simply be in the social stance and do a social thing at them. You will then enter a kind of "impress-me mode". There's a bar shaped like a rainbow, with you on the left and them on the right. Each side is impressing the other to a greater or lesser degree, and if your bars meet then you've successfully impressed them. Basically the other creature will do an action and you have to repeat it. If your level of a particular skill are high enough your little rainbow of impressedness fills up. As they could do pretty much anything you need to keep all of your social skills full to impress them. When you impress a given number of a nest that nest becomes your ally, and you get a DNA bonus.

Combat is simpler - eat their face. There's no real technique here. Kill a given number of the tribe's members to extinct them, and get a DNA bonus. Not to mention that you get access to parts just by shredding random creatures.

These parts are also found just lying around (as sparkley dinosaur bones) and you collect them just by clicking on them. Using your DNA (from impressing/extincting other creatuers) to buy new parts you've unlocked is a big part of the game, and forms the bulk of how you create and modify your creature.

As you get more DNA you get smarter. The increased smartitude lets you form a "pack". This means others of your species (or even allies) will come with you when you travel, helping to impress or eat the kidneys of other creatures. Having a larger pack is a definite advantage in terms of killing.

Unfortunately, the game is a little unbalanced. My first run as a social herbivore was vastly harder than my second try as an aggressive carnivore. There's little defense against a pack of large biting quadrupeds. I just increased Bite and Charge every time I could and I never needed anything else.

After a longer play with a few more brain expansions you end up ready for the next step. Make sure you've locked in the "look" of your creature by now, because you can't change it after this.

Creature Stage - Make friends. Kill them.

3. Tribal - Tribal is a simple RTS, as you take your newly smartified creature and help them ally or exterminate other tribes.

It's at this point the Spore train gets derailed. The gameplay mechanics and interface which worked well in the first place are scrapped, and replaced a very ordinary RTS. No instructions are given in how to do anything. You're told what to do, sometimes, but not the much needed HOW. For example, I knew I needed maracas, but nothing told me that I needed to take players other than the chieftain to the maraca place and assign them maracas. I just kept getting shown a picture of a club when I tried to talk to other cultures. Then it would tell me to press the button. But without knowing the club was a picture of maracas, and how to assign maracas, and how I needed a group that consisted of at least one person with maracas and the Chieftain.... none of that was explained, and it made little or no sense at the time. I literally ended up screaming at the game in frustration.

Then it got worse. After making a few friends I came across a group who had been raiding me. So I decided to raid them back. Many people, spears, all a good plan. But then my chieftain vanished. If you haven't played it that doesn't mean much, but you pretty much need your chieftain to do anything. I assumed he'd died, and waited for him to come back. But he never did. I started rebuilding my forces ready for another push. I got people farming, etc. I looked around for him, and couldn't find him. Eventually I did find him, by right clicking on his picture.

He was in space.

I'm not joking.

He was way way up in space, staring out at the vast empty nothing, musing on the vagaries of mortal life. And he was stuck there. I tried to move him, he would not move. I tried to do actions with him, they would not go. Then I started to notice his health dropping. He had not eaten. And he was in space... starving to death. But that was OK. When he died I'd have to wait, but when it respawned he'd be fixed anyway.

Very optimistic of me, hey?

He respawned in space again.So I quit, and reloaded.

SUCCESS! Chieftain is just outside the village. He's visible. Yay!

Wait! He's visible... selectable... but still stuck. And starving to death.

Nothing I could do at that point un-stuck my Chieftain, and I eventually had to simply restart again from the beginning.

I learned something from this experience, though - being aggressive is much easier than being social. Instead of being friendly my second time around I simply slaughtered everyone who wasn't me. It was much, much, faster.

Tribal gameplay is not that different from the creature gameplay in that you have to impress or exterminate. Impressing is done by building a few different buildings that make instruments: didgeridoo, maracas, and horn. Equipping one or two of each to your tribesmen and taking your chieftain to another village lets you play a "gig" for them. When they want maracas click maracas (or 1). When they want horns, click that button, etc. It's... tedious. But after a few gigs they'll ally with you and give you a gift of new technology and so on.

Again, conquest is simpler. While there are spears, stone axes or fire which damage at a distance, hurt people, or hurt buildings respectively, I found the best solution was just axes. In my second tribe I had one building - axes. While axes are slower to hurt buildings, a dead tribe isn't fighting back anyway, so there's no rush to destroy their town hall. Axes are easily quick enough.

After exterminating (or befriending) all neighbouring tribes, you're onto the next step - Civilisation.

Tribal - The beginning of the trouble

Stage 4 - Civilisation - pretty much like the game of the same name you have to befriend or exterminate rivals, while maintaining city outputs and happiness.

The Civilisation stage starts with you customising your own town hall, then customising your land vehicle style. This is uber-cool, letting you actually make the units you're going to use in the game. Later you can customise a sea and air vehicle style. You can also use pre-set ones, which I must admit I did.

The Civ stage plays like any of those same kinds of games. Oddly enough looked more like Alpha Centauri than anything else. Not sure why.

The problem with the Civ stage is that it's unbelievably shallow. The world you're on is surprisingly small. You have three unit types: land, sea, air; you have three building types: house - increases population and thus military, factory - increases income, but decreases happiness, entertainment - increases happiness.

You can make any military unit in any city (except that the city can't be landlocked to make a sea unit) and what buildings you have in a city are pretty irrelevant.

You can't bind units to "groups", meaning as your army gets larger it gets more and more annoying and tedious to control and co-ordinate.

And maybe it's just me but the "special attacks" that you get for taking over cities get excessive. I ended up with two buttons that when lit up for use would simply take over a city. I didn't even need an army near it. I could just fire and forget, taking over a city on each cooldown.

Victory was inevitable, and swift, leading me straight to space.

Civilisation - Except that it's not Civilization

5 Space Stage - Lead your people into intergalactic conquest. And/or be part of the galactic community. I wrote most of this review prior to actually playing the space stage. I'd heard it was good. And it's not bad. I guess. It reminds me of games like Freespace or Sins of a Solar Empire. At least, I would presume it does. I haven't actually played many of those games. Why not? Because, they're unspeakably dull. Spore keeps up with the genre, then, by remaining quite tedious. It's not awful. It's just.... uninteresting. I don't think this is what I would want from Spore.

Space - Ooh, galactic maps! It's like nerd porn!

6. Creature Creator - Ok, so it's not really a stage, but the Creature Creator is almost game on its own. The Creature Creator is an extremely impressive bit of technology and deserves mention separate from the game itself. Maxis' stated ambition with the CC is to allow normal people to create monsters and critters as impressive and entertaining as something Pixar could make, but without the skill requirements.

To a very large degree they've succeeded, and the result is a surprisingly in-depth model creation system. Not only can creatures be created dynamically, but the finished beastie is automatically animated, despite the potential complexities of number of legs, arms, stance, etc.

The creature creator uses pre-created parts plus some configurable settings to allow a remarkably diverse and entertaining array of creatures to be generated, with fine control at a startling level of detail.

Creating a creature - an impressive system in an otherwise tedious game

Another technical achievement is the ability to even run the game. Unlike a lot of recent PC games, Spore will run very well on most PCs, even as old as 5 years old. It will even look good at that, not just "barely run like a slideshow". It's nice to see good PC games that buck the trend of being unplayable on any system that exists for the next 6 months, and instead being broadly compatible.

So Spore is a technical marvel. But how is it as a game? The answer is not a good one. It fails fairly badly. There are multiple stages, but some work better than other, and the ones that work are buried to a large degree. The Tribal and Civilisation sections are particularly bad, both being un-fun simplistic mini-game clones of better games. The one area that works particularly well, the Creature stage, could well have been a great game if that's all there was, as long as the pieces kept coming and there was a bit more depth to it. But it's diluted among the rest, and all the fun is lost.

The bug that I encountered is a concern. No one else I've spoken to had a similar problem and I may be the only person to ever encounter it. But it was a completely crippling bug, utterly ending my gameplay experience, and if it happens to 1/10 people that's going to be a lot of very angry gamers.

A lot of people will buy this game. And most of them will enjoy it. A few love it. I have to be honest - I'm not sure why. While it's likeable, and the attention to detail in some parts is commendable, it really lacks the compelling and addictive nature of Wright's earlier contributions to the gaming world. Not least, SimCity and The Sims.

There's no "just one more go" to Spore, and while it can burn a few hours in a stretch, there's really not that much compulsion to go on by the end.

In the end, Spore reminds me more of Black and White than anything else. It's ambitious and beautiful. It's a God simulator set on an exaggeratedly small world. It's filled with impressive technology. And like that earlier title, it's just a pity there really isn't enough game to it.

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Final Verdict

Spore isn't what it should have been. By dividing into 5 different games it is diluted, eventually becoming 4 games that have been done better before or that barely count. The experience isn't the deep and compelling one we expected, but rather a shallow and simplistic little game. The only truly compelling experience is the Creature stage, and it's just too short to justify the rest.

Pros
Quite fun, impressive techology, great level of detail, great scope
Cons
Not as much fun as you'd think, ultimately very shallow. Frustrating lack of explanation. Repeatedly changing camera and control schemes.