Spore - PC

Spore, one of the most hyped games for the last few years is finally out, so lets see how it lives up to expectations!

For this day and age, the opening cutscene seems anaemic, but it conveys the important message that life in the Spore Universe can travel from planet to planet. Your species arrival on the planet by meteorite drops you into the ocean, where you must feed and evolve in what is best described as colorful version of the fl0w world, only more repetitive and without the great ambient music. Your first game option is to choose between a carnivorous or vegetarian lifestyle, a fraught choice that will affect your entire game; once you have picked one of these options, you are forced to eat either small red blobs (meat), or small green blobs (plants)... at least until you modify your creature to eat the other food type. Every dozen or so blobs you eat, you grow in size, frustratingly to find yourself in the exact same situation, with slightly different adversaries, e.g. an extra eye or a few more tentacles.

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it

The hyped evolution system falls apart on each modification. These can be begun at any time, with a click of the breeding call button (The Spore Universe operates on a fundamentally different love-life system than that of its players) and a handily nearby romantic partner will immediately fulfill its role, and you will enter the Modification mode for the newly fertilized egg (actually, this would mean that the creature you control is in fact female,so maybe the Spore Universe is not so different to ours...) From here you can pretty much change your entire creature into whatever you want, as many times as you want. DNA "points" earned during gameplay can now be spent on new attributes, such as fins and eyes, however the fact that you can trade-in these features to redeem your DNA points is a real flaw in gameplay. By being able to sell body-parts without penalty, there is no incentive to stick with developing your creature; its easier to just redesign it from scratch now and then, and this takes away from forming a bond with your creature. This kind of make the whole evolution onto the land feel particularly poor, because you change your creature so much in one huge leap that it feels like there is no connection to the earlier game.

The new land mode game plays like a hack and slash style game, only with less story-line. You wander the land (in game terms, that about 30 meters) to find new species. Strangely, new species all live in exactly the same style of nest as your, and can can almost never be found more than a few meters from that nest. Once found, your options are to either exterminate or befriend these new and unknown species, by repetitively clicking the "sing" or "bite" button... However, advanced upgrades allow more complex interactions, like repetitively clicking the "dance" or "sting" button. As far as obtaining upgrades, these can be found, fascinatingly, by poking around the scattered piles of bones randomly placed on the map, in some bizarre Lamarkian twist on evolution.

All this changes with the evolution of a bigger brain, and the commencement of of the Tribal era. This is best described as a slow motion RTS with a maximum of 12 units... well your limit is six to start with, but we wouldn't want to make things too confusing after the previous sections now, would we? Although there are many possible upgrades available for this section of the game (actually 6), all you really need to do is get the stone clubs and bash all the other species to death, a task that can be completed in an hour or so. It is sad to note that the less intelligent species we tried so hard to befriend as allies in the previous game play section now serve merely as convenient snacks. The complete slaughter of all other sentient life on the planet heralds the beginning of Civilization!

This mode revolves around the control of Spice Wells, to power the construction of your armies. You can pour you energy into the construction of tanks, battleships and aircraft. While all the previous levels involved a certain amount to needless grind, its is truly in this level that spore turns the table on game play and evolves into ridiculously fucking hard. Maybe I started to slow, didn't grasp the the fundamentals quickly enough, or misallocated by resources in the first few milliseconds of gameplay, but I now find myself in the situation of facing an opponent 10 times the size, with no possibility of recovery, and with no apparent way to restart the level. It does make a nice change the previous sections.

A money cheat allowed for for jump into Galaxy Mode. Although many reviews mistakenly claim that this section is what the game had been building too, I found this section a vast let down, being constantly forced to run errands and fight uninspired battles with poor mechanics. Spore was hyped as the ultimate longitudinal simulation strategy and exploration game, from the single cell to the world encompassing civilization, but life itself for the most part has been 3 billions of years of monotonous eating, sleeping and fucking, so getting only one out of three right is not such a huge success in my opinion. The majority of game play has been more successfully implemented in other smaller flash games, cellular life in fl0w, nanowars for civilization. What Spore does is wrap up these mini-games into a stylized, 3d world, and tones down the fun a bit. It probably fits in very well with the emerging casual gaming crowd, but is that really an evolutionary branch of gaming we want to support?

-- Review by Dave