Game Review: Spore (PC)

After eight years of development and three years of hype, Spore finally hit the UK shelves last week. With the incredible concept of designing and raising your own species combined with the epic scale, Spore was promising to be one of the greatest achievements of all time. But could it deliver on those promises?

You’ll begin Spore as a single celled organism. As a cell, you’ll be taught the basic skills of Spore: how to eat and how to adapt. It’s incredibly basic, with the gameplay simply being “swim here and eat”, and learning to adapt a simple process of adding as many extras as possible, but it’s still enjoyable and accessible.

You’re probably best off avoiding the big ones…

After playing as a cell for about thirty minutes (or several billion years, whichever way you want to look at it), you’ll reach the Creature stage. While the gameplay is essentially the same as the cell stage (except instead of just eating other species, you can now become friends with them), the creature creator part of the game is improved a thousand fold. Anybody who has played, or even seen the Spore: Creature Creator in action will know just how deep and intricate it is at this stage. The only limit is your own imagination, and while it may sound like I stole that line out of ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’, it’s true nonetheless, and evident just through browsing the online Sporepedia. Just the Creature Creator alone is enough for me to recommend Spore, because it’s absolutely superb, original, and allows you to be incredibly creative. Or to just build a race of penis-people, whatever floats your boat.

Unfortunately, what is easily Spore greatest feature is cast aside after a couple of hours, when your species enter the tribal stage. This is the point where Spore stops being a monotonous, repetitive simulation game, and becomes a monotonous, repetitive strategy game. While there are a few charming aspects to the tribal stage, such as performing musical ceremonies for other tribes, it’s otherwise mediocre. Collecting fruit, attacking enemies and building a settlement is dry and repetitive, and since every settlement looks the same it’s even a boring visual experience - which was unexpected after the brilliance of the first two stages.

Eventually your species will become bored of miraculously turning fruit into wooden buildings, and decide to found a city and begin the Civilisation stage, and you’ll find that there are more ways to play the game as opposed to the simple “kill or befriend” strategy in the previous stages. Now there’s a choice of religious, economic and violent expansion, but this apparent variety is more than a little misleading. Each kind of expansion plays exactly the same: build as many vehicles as you can and send them to take over an enemy city, which so mind-numbingly simple it becomes boring after only a few minutes. Granted, there are a few new customisation options available, and you’ll now be able to create your own vehicles and buildings. But after the depth and intricacy of the Creature Creator, it feels incredibly simplistic. It’s like being given a massive box of Lego, but after using up all the small, interesting pieces on building something unique and interesting, all you have left is the big, red, square blocks to build a house with.

"Now if I put this big block on top of this big block..."

By the time I’d reached the Space Age, I’d become so disillusioned by Spore that I didn’t feel like having a proper go with it. I’ll hold my hands up and admit I didn’t give it the time it may have needed, but only because I felt it didn’t deserve it. Video game snobbery at it’s finest.

The ultimate goal of Spore is take your species into space, and explore the galaxy. As the captain of a solo spaceship (I made mine look like an X-Wing, because I’m cool like that) you’ll explore and colonise new worlds, to expand your civilisation across the galaxy. The stage’s epic scale is overwhelming at first, you’ll soon discover that, unfortunately, the linearity of the gameplay undermines the grand scale significantly. What’s the point in giving you an entire galaxy to play with, if it’s just going to tell you where to go? It’s like Mass Effect boasting it had an entire galaxy of gameplay, but only five of the planets served any relevance. This along with the boring, repetitive (how many times have I used that word in this review now?) objectives, makes for another lacklustre gameplay experience that only EA can serve up so consistently.

Remember, the only reason you're there is because a penis in a top hat told you to go there.

It probably goes without saying that Spore is a letdown. Failing to deliver on just about every promise it made, I can’t think of many who will be truly satisfied with what Spore has to offer at the moment. In trying to make itself accessible and appealing to the masses, Spore has become oversimplified and dull, effectively alienating almost every demographic of gamer. Spore has some charm, and the creative aspect saves it from being an average game, but it’s not enough to overshadow the flaws, and the majority of the game is simply mediocre. Eight years well spent, eh Maxis?

7/10

(This is the first review I’ve written which works to word limits and a set style, so there were a couple of teething problems. Sorry if it’s not up to my usual standards, I'll work on any problems brought up for when I write my next review.)