Spore
Where to start with Spore? Unless you just came to Earth on a meteorite you will already be familiar with the concept. If you did just crashland on the planet (by the way, hi!) then the concept will soon be very familiar to you.
Where some games like to take a slice of life, say Germany in the early 1940s or a distant fantasy land on the brink of destruction, Spore has its eyes on the whole cake. The scene opens on the titular spore, a single-celled organism freshly brewed from the primordial soup on a newborn planet. The game essentially ends when this creature's descendants make it to the centre of the galaxy in their own spaceship.
If you think that this is quite a far-reaching concept then you would be correct. Simulating existence in all of its glory is a tough challenge for a computer that spends most of its time dealing with bouncing balls and playing Ode to Joy. For that reason Spore divides evolution into five separate stages and treats them independently. We will thus review them as such.
Cell
The Cell stage follows our little potential galaxy-conqueror as he deals with more mundane tasks like nibbling veg and getting stabbed in the eye. Protoplasmic glop is a dangerous mix of tasty snacks and larger, more carnivorous creatures-to-be. Swimming around the 2D aquarium of violent death results in the gradual increase in size, along with the acquisition of DNA and cellular blueprints which lead to the important evolutionary device known as the Creature Creator.
The Creature Creator is the glue that holds together the various limbs of Spore. A sort of fleshy Lego that David Lynch might have played with as a child, the Creator invites you to play God in the most endearingly blasphemous way possible. Stick a fin here, an extra mouth there, paint the whole thing purple and get back in the water. The resulting creature is always something very unique to you alone, and this uniqueness is a motif that runs throughout the game. You might don a shiny new breastplate as you romp through the wilds of Terokkar Forest, but how many times have you grown an extra pair of eyes and venom sacs on your ribs?
Creature
After proving your worth as a Cell the other amoebas kick you out of the pond for spawncamping and you take your first gasping breaths of oxygen on terra firma. The basic idea remains the same — hunt, eat, evolve, survive — but the world just got a whole lot more complex. The cellular puberty results in the spontaneous growth of legs and other wobbly appendages, and the options in the Creature Creator increase a hundredfold.
At this point, we may pause. The next few hours of play will largely be spent messing around with evolution and creating an array of nightmarish abominations and cute widdle wabbits with beaks. Mutation is a breeze, and as long as you have enough DNA and the right blueprints anything is possible. Amazingly, the Creature Creator works everything out and turns your design into a living, breathing, dancing... thingy. This is where Spore's other USP makes itself known. The game is entirely single-player, but your own genetic freaks are sent out into the internet where they might thrive in other people's games. The very next colony of creatures you see might only exist in the Spore universe because some guy in France designed it last week.
With a fully-fledged species under your control, the next task is to develop some grey matter. This can be accomplished in one of two ways, either by chowing down on the now-extinct remains of anything which gets in your way, or experimenting with communication and making friends with the neighbouring wildlife. Both are as boring as sin.
That got your attention, didn't it?
Combat in Spore is frightfully dull. With a total of four attack skills to choose from, and aptitude in those being determined by body components, there simply isn't enough complexity to make it anything more than a shallow grind. Victory or defeat is obvious when the first bite lands, and it doesn't even matter if you die because you are a species and not an individual. You simply literally respawn and know not to go over there again in a hurry. If you choose to undertake the peaceful route, you again have four skills and engage the object of your affection in a button-matching game. If he sings, you sing back. If your sing stat is lower than his, you fail.
Just to reiterate: button-matching game.
Tribe
With a mighty brain and the ability to use tools, the Tribal stage can begin.
It's the same as the Creature stage but with drag-selecting and the two sets of four creature abilities replaced with two sets of three types of equipment. The Creature Creator now deals solely with clothing as, at this point and forever onwards, all species are equal.
Astute readers may notice a dramatic drop in paragraph length and purple prose at this point in the review. This is because the Tribe section is so frightfully monotonous and forgetful that, despite having replayed it a few hours ago, I cannot find any part of my brain willing to recall anything interesting to say.
Civilisation
Congratulations! You have fought long and hard long to assert yourself as the dominant species in the world, and now it is time to take it over. While you weren't looking, you see, there was some sort of civil war and somebody thought it would be a cool idea to develop countries and now the whole world has gone to pot. There might be a moral in the tale here, but it hides away behind a segment so bland that it makes Tribes sound exciting.
It is now possible to build three vehicle types (land, sea, and air) for three classes (economic, religious and military) in the revised Creator, along with three building types and a defensive turret with which to populate your city. Each vehicle has the same function of taking over enemy cities by bombarding it with appropriate "ammunition", be it money, propaganda, or actual explosive ammo. Steamroll around the world with a small cluster of various air units — why not? — and the whole sorry section will be over in minutes.
Space
Once you find yourself in space, the main game begins with an echo of the "wow" feeling that came with your first steps on land. Casually zooming out from your once great home planet you catch a glimpse of the star system that sustained your life for so many millions of years. Keep stroking the mousewheel however, and neighbouring stars will drift into view, each with their own collection of orbiting planets. Spin further and these stars become pinpricks, merging together to form a gaseous cloud of light that is soon revealed to be part of a cluster of unimaginable magnitude. When the screen finally stops crash zooming and even this cluster forms an idly drifting segment of a single spiral arm of an entire galaxy you might start to feel a little sick.
Between you and the galactic central core lies thousands of parsecs of open space pocketed with millions of stars, each orbited by planets populated by species freshly downloaded from the internet that you've never seen before.
Here Spore crunches gears and goes all Xboxey with the idea of Badges. By accomplishing tasks such as colonising a few planets, your civilisation gains achievements and learns how to make more spacefaring tools such as better colonising equipment. Flitting around local space and playing nice with neighbouring sentience expands your empire to dizzying proportions. The gear change also turns the Space segment into a sort of functional Planet Creator, allowing your command ship to terraform ugly hunks of rock into lush utopias with rolling pink mountains and deep green seas. Ugly hunks of soil, then. These may then be colonised and filled with new ecosystems, all by hand and all to produce valuable Spice for trading.
Then an alien race declares war on you and every five minutes you have to fly your only spaceship to a planet that's under attack and hope you can earn enough Spice and Badges to eventually pay off the invaders or bomb their worlds back to the primordial age.
You probably can't.
In Conclusion
I want to love Spore. The crazy nutter Will Wright set down the most impossible design brief gaming has ever seen and actually followed through with it. The game allows you to throw together lumps of meat and inject life into it, watching it wobble about and chirrup. And oh, how it wobbles about beautifully. Unfortunately Spore itself doesn't work in the same way, and the meaty chunks of game glued onto the Creators more resemble deadly tumours on a beautiful freeform frame. The Sims didn't really have a point either but at least you can play with them and see how they respond. Spore grants you the ultimate sandbox but gives you nothing to play with.
Ultimately, Spore is fascinating tool thrust into an utterly simplistic waste of time.
| Breadwinners |
|---|
|
| Yeast infections |
|
| Final Score | |
|---|---|
| Creature Creator: | Creature Creator! |
| Complexity: | Irreducible (any further) |
| Ooze: | Primordial |
| One game out of Six | |
| We are given all the complex wonder in the galaxy and asked to play marbles with it | |
