Here is my initial review of the game Spore. I bought this game the day it came out as I was majorly excited about its release. To give a quick summery of the game right off the bat, I'm fairly disappointed. But, I have more to say than just that.
Mainly, I guess I was expecting a more "SimEverything" type game, which I believe was actually one of the original titles given to the game. And by that, I guess I was expecting the same type of depth that was available in games such as SimCity and SimEarth, but playable through all the stages from cell to space. Instead, this game plays like five different games, but watered-down versions of the games. With the time that was spent making the game, I was hoping for so much more.
For a background on where this review is coming from, SimCity is probably my favorite game series of all time. I own all the real SimCity titles(SimCity - SimCity 4, the Societies one is a bastard and does not count). I would have to say that SimCity 2000 is probably my favorite, but I would probably like Sim City 4 the best if I ever owned a computer that was able to play it once the city grew really large. I may get back into that game in another 5 years or so. I am also a big fan of SimEarth and loved the control that game allowed over planetary development.
As for my Spore background, I have played the game up to the space stage. Other reviews seem to indicate that the space stage is the best part of the game, but I have only just started it, so it will not be included in this review. I will say however, if other reviews are true, Maxis should have just made this game to be a space simulator and with the creature creator, they shouldn't have wasted time with all the other stages as it seems it was just put in there so the game would live up to what they have been talking about doing for years.
The first stage you play is the cell stage. There is little that gets done here. You either eat meat, which is just randomly floating around for no apparent reason, or you eat plants. There is little skill involved. The only thing this stage really does is introduce you to customizing your creature and getting items. The items are what you build your cell out of, and these are gained by killing other cells and other times they just randomly appear. I'm not really certain at all how this level is in any way supposed to be a simulation.
After that you move on to the creature stage. There is one really cool part about this stage, designing the creature. There actually seemed to be a lot of work done with this as it's super easy to add parts and manipulate your creature into looking just how you want. I will say that this part is actually fun. Then again, I could have just bought that part of the game for $10 as it went on sale before Spore came out. The big problem with this stage though, is that it just drags on. There isn't a whole lot you can do, either make friends, or attack people. Actually, it seems that all this entire game is about. There isn't really a whole lot of skill to this level. If you want to make friends with people, you have to get allies to follow you around, but that sucks cause they die so easily. Then you have to keep going back to their villages and picking them back up. Otherwise, you can just fight everyone. And you don't really need allies for that. I found the best way is to just get someone to chase you so that they leave their village area, then you can fight them one on one. Repeat this about 5 times or so and you destroyed that creature completely.
After the creature stage, you move on to the tribe stage. This part is so boring and I didn't like it one bit. It has the same exact elements as the creature stage, either make friends with tribes, or destroy them. But, making the buildings was lame and the outfits were boring. You can get full level 5 on all your stats after the first or second tribe you destroy or friend. Additionally, they changed how the camera controls work compared with the creature stage. The controls make it seem like you switched to playing a different game, yet, the game itself is almost exactly the same. If I were to make Spore, I think I would have made this part of the game to be very similar to Age of Empires. No exact defined area where you are settled. Much more in depth on gathering supplies and such. The only difference I guess would be the possibility to make friends with the other tribes instead of just destroying them like AoE. Of course, the destruction would still be possible and probably most fun.
After tribe stage is civilization stage. This part is a blatant rip off of the game Civilization. Civilization is yet another favorite game of mine. I do like the fact that Spore is real time though as opposed to being turn-based. But, beyond that, it's mostly a very simplified version of Civ. The only unique thing really is that you can design the buildings which is pretty cool. I wouldn't be surprised to see that feature in a later version of Civ. They could have at least made it as detailed and as fun as Civ. Regardless, this part of the game seemed somewhat fun. There was some depth, such as cites could be economic or military based. The lame part of this level was how quick it was. I completed it in less than an hour. I would have liked to get more into this part of the game.
I just started to get into the space stage, which is the final part of the game. The flying training was actually pretty sweet, there is lots of fun things to do such as abduct beings and shoot lasers. I will have to post another review once I play this stage more.
Overall, this is probably a game I would have been much better off just downloading off bittorrent and playing for a couple days. I don't think I'd really recommend buying it. It's probably much more enjoyable to either buy Civ4 if you don't have it, or it you do, just pull it out of your archives and play that again.
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