Spore Impressions (mild spoiler, but not really)

[Tom Hatfield]

Disappointing. Extremely disappointing. I get the feeling they put so much work into the creators that they didn't have time left to make a compelling game out of it. Add to that the fact that the demos clearly demonstrate features you can't actually do in the final release (like dragging corpses), and it feels very cut-back. Let me give my impressions of each stage.

Tidepool (cell stage) — fun for about five minutes, which is how long it should take you to finish it. I really thought there would be so much more to this part of the game. The visual effects are rather spectacular, but that's all it has going for it. Note that there is no water stage as was shown in the demo videos . . . you go straight from flagellum to legs.

Landfall (creature stage) — it's obvious this is where most of the work went. Addictive and fun, but sorely lacking in variety. You can befriend creature packs, or you can kill them. Other activities include: digging up bones for bonus parts, eating plants, eating animals, and avoiding the epic creatures (or being killed instantly by them, which in my opinion is the opposite of fun). Once you've played it once, you're hard-pressed to find a reason to do it again.

Tribal stage — completely worth skipping. It plays vaguely like an extremely dumbed-down strategy game with extremely horrible camera controls. This is where I began seeing real flaws in the design, because the controls become inconsistent at this point and tend to change every stage thereafter. Your options here: befriend other tribes, or kill them. Other activities include: gathering food, avoiding or killing epic creatures. Seriously, that's it.

It may be worth noting that, by this point, I was utterly sick of designing things. I'd spend exactly enough time in the various creators as it took to build something passingly familiar, and then I would proceed with the "game." It's not that making buildings and vehicles shouldn't be fun — admittedly, I did spend a lot of time getting my spaceship to look just right — but when you've spent the last three months fiddling with the Creature Creator, you just don't care anymore. Hence, why the game needs more "game" and less "creator."

Civilization stage — more interesting than tribal, not interesting enough to care. Again, it plays very much like a dumbed-down strategy game, but without any kind of strategy. You have essentially an unlimited income, so you can waste units to your heart's content and simply rebuild them in a matter of seconds. The most strategic part of the game is maximizing the yield of your cities by placing buildings next to houses. There are basically three types of buildings you can place: houses, entertainment, and industrial. Placing either of the latter two next to a house increases its yield. As for vehicles, there are three kinds: military vehicles destroy things, while religious vehicles take them over. I didn't even see an economic vehicle, nor can I tell you what it does. These flavors come in land, sea, and air varieties. I made due with only land and sea.

Space stage — not sure what to think. You can't go just anywhere like they suggest in the demo until you have your hand held through a series of "training" missions. After that, you take missions from the various races you encounter. Missions are all basically the same: go somewhere, do something simple, come back to claim your reward. Occasionally you get to blow up some spacecraft. I've yet to see any real terraforming tools, but I can say this: even though there are literally thousands of planets, and each one looks different, they all end up exactly the same. You throw down some plants, a couple herbivores, and a carnivore to round out the tier. Build a colony if it pleases you. Rinse. Repeat. A thousand times. Oh, and you don't even get to watch the ecosystem grow. As soon as you drop a life form, it instantly fills out the world.

I have to say, I'm severely disappointed that I spent money on this game. From all the fabulous demos, I expected so much more. The creature stage is mindlessly fun, and it is amusing to see your own creatures in the game — especially since nearly every epic creature is one of your own, provided you have enough variety to fill them out. Playing on the ego, I'm sure, except it rather annoyed me; I would have preferred seeing something I hadn't created myself. The space stage has potential, provided you're patient enough to endure until you unlock some awesome toys (the planetary death ray looks pretty killer).

It's also worth noting that the flora and planetary editors have mysteriously found their way out of the software. I was really looking forward to making some plants. I'm sure they're waiting to put out an expansion and milk the public for all they can get. After two seasons of Sims expansions, I should have known.

I don't know. I don't really dislike the game, but I won't be investing nearly as much time in it as I originally feared. In fact, if I never played it again, I wouldn't lose any sleep. I'm going to try to keep my head up for other releases this year, like Fallout 3, Borderlands, and Far Cry 2. I hope they don't disappoint in the same way.

The good news is, contrary to what Maxis actually tells you, you can run it natively on a Mac. The bad news is, it runs emulated under Cider, which generates its own share of problems (especially if you use Little Snitch, which arbitrarily blocks all outgoing traffic from Cider). You're far better off dual-booting to XP with Boot Camp and running it there.

[Gambit37]

Oh. Poop.

Well, I need a new PC to play it anyway. I guess I'm hardly missing out.

[Ameena]

Well, I just finished the Civ Phase before I went to bed last night - I haven't actually advanced to the Space Phase yet so I skipped that part of your review. So far I'm enjoying it - I'm not sure which phase I like best, and there's certainly no phase (so far) where I'd go "Omg I'm not playing through that one again". None of the phases so far have been majorly difficult, but all have managed to be interesting in some way. They're sort of like a series of mini-games, really.
I'm kind of addicted to creating things, so I'll probably replay it through a fair few times to get the most out of each phase and try to advance in a different way each time. Also, the Creature Phase looks like it has more replayability because I didn't unlock all the body parts the first time through - when I start again I'll make an aggressive carnivore or something, and see if I can unlock more bits. This time I was a herbivore so I only got herbivore mouthparts to drop.


Here follows my erm...description/opinion thing of what I've played so far. If you don't want to know too much about what happens, best not read .


Cell phase was fun. Reminds me of a game I played online a while back called "Fl0w". I like the currents in the water that affect your movement/speed if you swim into them. And there's that weird thrill of seeing part of something huge and scary-looking just off the screen and frantically trying to get away from it in case it's a carnivore and decides to turn round and try and eat you. Then, when you've grown a bit yourself, you swim along and find whatever that huge beasty was, only now you're the one that's huge, and you can get revenge by stabbing them, or whatever . And I think the ickle tiny brain picture that appears when you end the phase is cute .
Creature phase, as I mentioned, offers replayability int he shape of getting all the bits (well, Cellular would too, I suppose, if you didn't manage to get them all the first time around, but being cellular, there's not a huge amount of parts to collect). It's sort of like a vague kind of RPG - you have a group of your creatures living around a nest. You wander around looking for food, collecting body parts, occasionally have to migrate to a new nest, and as your brain size increases, you can also incite more members of your group to follow you. If you impress other species nearby enough to increase their standing with you to "Ally" level (by playing a sort of mimic-game in which you copy their actions such as singing, dancing etc...if you're not as good at certain actions as the creature's you're trying to impress, they...well, won't be impressed ), you can get them to follow you too. Most other species live in a group around a nest as you do, and you can either kill them (thereby making that species extinct), impress them, or just ignore them. You get DNA points as rewards for stuff and use this to advance your creature. Once your brain gets big enough, you get one last trip to the Creature Creator to finalise your design before moving on to the Tribal stage.
Tribal phase, you start with three creatures of your species. One is the cheiftain, the others are just tribal members. You stat with certain special abilities based on how you played the Creature Phase, determined by stuff such as whether you played nice with everyone or ran around clawing them to bits. Similar to the Creature phase, there are a bunch of other tribes (of different species) in the surrounding area. You need to keep up relations with them if you don't want them to keep attacking you or pinching your food, but this isn't too hard - just keep sending them presents and stuff. Or get your tribe together and go and mash them. You can build little hut things that give your tribe different things. The huts fall into three categories - one is musical instruments (for impressing other tribes once they like you enough not to try and beat you up if you're not carrying a present for them), one is weapons (for smashing up the other tribes if you can't be arsed/don't want to try and get on their good side), and the other is, umm...utility stuff I suppose you'd call it - a healing tent and stuff to help you fish and gather fruit better. You can also access an Outfit Editor, in which you can clothe your creatures. All members use the same outfit so you don't need to design one for each individual member. Once you've dealt with all the other tribes (by reaching Ally status with them or wiping them out), your species becomes the dominant force on your continent, and can advance to the next stage.
The Civilisation phase starts you off with a city. Again, you receive certain skills and a starting "attitude" based on how you played your way through the previous phase. There's an ongiong timeline thing that comes up each time you complete a phase which shows you the path you've taken. There are other cities of your species which you need to "take care of" as in the Tribal phase. From the looks of it, you can either blow them up (Military), convert them (Religious...which is what I ended up as due to having been nice and lovely to everyone in the Tribal Phase), or buy their city (Trader). I don't know much about what Traders are like because there was only one city near me of that type - they contacted me and asked if I wanted to start trading, so I said yes and for the rest of the game they had little car things going backwards and forwards 'tween my city and theirs. Once I'd taken over all the other cities, they called me and asked if they could jointly rule with me (because we were "Ally" status), so I said yes and finished my planetary takeover that way . You also gain access to both the Building and Vehicle editors in this one. There are actually three Vehicle editors - Land, Sea, and Air. You're restricted to making only the type of vehicles associated with that type of city. When you take over a city, if it's of a different type to yours (Military/Religious/Trader), you're offered the choice of leaving it as it is (and thereby gaining access to that type of vehicle) or changing it to whatever your native city-type is. Once you've dealt with all the other cities, by whatever means, you can advance to the Space Phase.
Note that you don't have to immediately advance to the next phase - when your progress bar for that phase is complete (shown along the bottom of the screen), you get a button next to it which you can click at any time and move on.
Anyway, that's as far as I've got atm - tonight I shall create my spaceship!

[Ameena]

Woohoo, I'm in space . This looks like being a whole other game in itself, really - flying around, trading, making contact with other races, doing missions and stuff, all of which seems to unlock the various terraforming tools and stuff you need to fix up your own planets - looks like it's gonna take a while .