Spore: Quick Review

By far the most fascinating aspect of Spore is the Spore Creature Creator. If you enjoy customizing every single little aspect of your very own race of 7 legged fish-men, then you will probably waste hours on just this aspect of the game, and admittedly it is impressive.

Cellular Stage:
The first stage of Spore was done remarkably well, in terms of actual game play, this is probably where you will have the most fun. You start off as a little single-cell organism and grow as you feed on other cells. The coolest part of this level is being able to “see through” to the higher levels of life.  You can see the outlines of giant, blurry scary creatures lurking in the background until you eat enough food to reach their level, and then you pop into their reality - your previous predators now suddenly smaller than you. This continues for a while until you’ve accumulated enough genes to start evolving legs.

Creature Stage:
Here you evolve the major features of your creature and determine its ultimate shape and attributes, while attacking or befriending neighboring creature burrows. This stage is slightly repetitive maybe, but still entertaining. Make sure your creature looks exactly the way you want it before advancing to the tribal stage, and get wings.

Tribal Stage:
As with the creature stage, you befriend or destroy neighboring settlements with the addition of rudimentary tools,weapons and instruments to enhance your creatures. More entertaining and diverse than the creature stage.

Civilization Stage:
More diverse than the tribal stage, you need to manage cities and people. You can build land, air and sea vehicles. Less fun than the tribal stage and can get slightly repetitive.

Space Stage:
Irritating as hell! The spore developers realized it would take you about 4 hours of gameplay to reach the final stage, so they try to squeeze 30 more hours out of this level. You fly around in a single spaceship, establishing trade routes, terraforming planets and conquering rival civilizations. The only problem is that, every time you want to go on your own mission, 5 alerts pop up informing you that two of your planets are under pirate attack and three are in immenant danger of ecosystem collapse, all requiring your immediate attention. So you spend 95% of the time flying to random solar systems, killing pirates and frying infected creatures, and in the mean time you’re told to try and reach the center of the galaxy to discover some ultimate treasure that the Grox (An evil, super-powerful alien species who literally collonized every planet within a 5000 planet radius around the galaxtic center) are guarding.

You can build a 4 ship fleet, but the other three ships -have- to be allied units, and of course they are useless at both attack and defense, so they get vaporised within seconds (and this pisses off your allies). So you pretty much have to battle your way through the Grox alone for a couple of hours (while ignoring the total collapse of half your and your allies’ planets because they are too useless to defend/take care of themselves.) And when you finally reach the center of the galaxy you find:

**Spoiler alert!**

A space-ship with the name “Steve”, who is basically a parody of god, telling you that you are now “One of us” and giving you 42 staff’s of life or something. This amazing gift allows you to completely terraform a planet in one go. Super useful for my militaristic race of space conquerors who rely on the hostile takeover of planets of course… Biggest let-down ever. So, returning home again through the hordes of Grox, you complete a couple of missions to fill up the green experience bar at the bottom of the screen, just to find that you actually had no reason to do so since nothing happens when it is complete. Yes, apart from reaching the galactic center and having a chat with Steve, there is no point to the space stage whatsover.

Conclusion:

This game is seriously overhyped. Get it if you like games like the Sims and like designing your own creatures, vehicles and buildings. Otherwise, the only part of it that’s really worth it is the first 25 minutes.