Spore (PC, 2008)

Spore is an enjoyable game that pulls off an interesting balancing act. On one hand, it lets you create a creature and guide its maturation from a single cell to a galactic civilization through an unusual process of evolutionary development. Because the tools used to create and revise this creature are so robust and amusing, and each creation's charms are so irresistible, it's hard not to get attached to your digital alter ego. Spore culls elements from multiple genres and strips them down to their simplest forms. By themselves, these elements aren't very remarkable; but within the context of a sprawling journey, they complement each other nicely and deliver a myriad of delights.

Spore's greatest asset, by far, is its intuitive set of creation tools. If you've played the separate Creature Creator, released earlier this year, you're only seeing a small piece of the puzzle. At various stages, you'll construct, for example, town halls, land vehicles sporting cannons, and aircraft that spout religious propaganda. The creatures are the true stars though, and you can mix and match legs, arms, mouths, wings, and lots of other parts into a beautiful work of art--or a hideous monstrosity. Each part of your creation can be turned, resized, and twisted, so whether you wish to re-create a favorite cartoon character or develop an original concept, you'll probably find what you need in here. Even if your onscreen buddy is a three-armed ogre with scales running up his belly, you'll be spending some time getting to know him in the first few hours of gameplay, and you'll probably develop some affection for him in spite of his hideousness.

You will need to put some creative energy into Spore, but if you aren't the artistic type, you can use premade designs that ship with the game. Even better, you can utilize Spore's extensive community tools, inserting other players' innovations into your own game in progress. It's actually a lot of fun to sift through others' creations. In Spore, community and gameplay come together in a fresh and user-friendly manner. In fact, to get the most out of the game, you should be online whenever you play. Not only will doing so give you access to Sporepedia, but most of the other creatures, vehicles, and even entire planets you encounter will have been created by other players. Community involvement is a core aspect of the Spore experience, and the sharing factor is poised to give the game remarkable longevity.

Spore's sound design shines from beginning to end. The creatures themselves sound terrific, and are the source of much of the game's overflowing charm. Of particular note is the customizable ambient music introduced in the civilization stage, and the hysterical incomprehensible Simlish spoken by the various galactic leaders.

Spore keeps a timeline of events, pinpointing every decision made and assigning you into broad categories based on your overall behavior (social, adaptable, etc), so there's plenty of reason to try a different approach. Not that these varied approaches make for drastically different gameplay, but they do give you a reason to revisit the amusing moments that make Spore unique. Taken on their own, its pieces are nothing special. As parts of a singular ambitious vision, they work far better. Throw in the best customization tools seen in years and an enthusiastic community brimming with creativity, and you have a legitimately great game that will deliver hours of quality entertainment.

Spore is from the makers of Sim City and The Sims. They have created another hit that will be an instant classic. I love the fact that you can build your own being from cell stage to space age. There is no shortage of combination to making a creation just as you believe that it should look. If just to make it look cool to having a strategic plan for each part its all up to you. I admit there are times that the game seems boring, however there are more good than bad parts of this game.

The cell stage seems more of a survival stage first you pick carnivore or herbivore you can change to an omnivore only in cell stage so if you want to now is the time. You must steer your cell creation through a primordial ooze looking for food, spare parts, and a mate. The spare parts that you collect and the mate you find put you in a editor that let you modify you cell to help perpetuate your cell species. After you have collected all the parts you must evolve into a land creature. This stage is my favorite you have much more parts to collect and more interaction with other creatures. You begin with the amount of cell that you kept alive so if you had 5 you begin the next stage with 5 creatures emerging from the water to land. They all live in a nest that you find and from there they work as a collective to again perpetuate the creatures. You can either fight or try to impress other creatures, however much like life some creatures there are no reasoning with so you have to fight. After you have impressed or killed enough creatures and you have developed you brain enough then begins the tribal stage which is basically like creature only without anymore modifying of the creature and now fight or impressions there are tools involved. Once you complete this you move on to civilization! You create a city for your beings to live along with vehicles and industry! All of these new abilities come with the consequence of how you acted in the last 3 stages if you where peaceful then you civilization can be industrious or religious. If you were aggressive you become a military civilization, but it seems to mix and match this. Eventually you either blow everybody up or use propaganda to conquer and build a space ship. The last stage is the space age (stage)here you must defend the people you allied with in the civilization stage (if you don't the become a pain) and terraform new planets as well as explore existing living planets in the stages that were previously in.

The online aspect of the game is truly amazing you can display your creation to the world on U-tube full video. You create you own back story of how your creation came about and it's progress as you steer it into the world. The Online part is optional as you may want to give your creature it's privacy or if it happens to be a witness of the state and simply can't allow it's location revealed at this time.

This game's playability is very high in the fact that after you complete a stage and want to start over you can start from any period of the highest completed that you want. Example if you have completed the first game you played with in civilization stage you can start a new game in any of the last 3 stages without having to go through the cell, creature, tribe over again if you didn't like those stages. The in game editors are excellent, online ability is awesome, and the in game humor is what you expect from EA games.

I recommend this game to anyone with an open and creative imagination!

I really enjoyed playing Spore; so much that I played it thru a few different times.

The games is broken down into 5 stages; Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space.

Once you get a hang of the controls it is fairly easy to blast thru the first 4 stages of the game, especially if you are not custom creating your creatures, buildings and vehicles. The editor is a lot of fun the first time thru and I always had fun experimenting with the creature editor in the early stages, I found the building and vehicle editor just slowed down the game for me and lost its novelty after the first couple of play thrus.

The reason the game has such great playability is that depending on your strategy in the game can highly alter you tactics needed to win. Are you going to gain dominance to advance the stage by diplomacy or war? Or maybe something in between?

If you enjoy strategy games and being creative you are sure to love this game as much as I have. The only complaint I have is that the space stage was a little difficult and long compared to the other stages, but still a lot of fun, even though I never “finished” the game.


More Info From The Spore Website:
How will you create the universe?

With Spore you can nurture your creature through five stages of evolution: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Or if you prefer, spend as much time as you like making creatures, vehicles, buildings and spaceships with Spore’s unique Creator tools.

CREATE Your Universe from Microscopic to Macrocosmic - From tide pool amoebas to thriving civilizations to intergalactic starships, everything is in your hands.

EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages - It’s survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization.

EXPLORE your world and beyond - Will you rule, or will your beloved planet be blasted to smithereens by a superior alien race?

SHARE with the World - Everything you make is shared with other players and vice versa, providing tons of cool creatures to meet and new places to visit.

While Spore is a single player game, your creations and other players’ creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, providing a limitless number of worlds to explore and play within.

While it is great fun and as easy as could be expected to design a creature from scratch, with amazing freedom, the game can be very repetitive. The worst offender is the Creature stage, where you're only task it to find other groups of creatures and either befriend them (by imitating them in an almost-minigame) or kill them (by clicking on your attacks in a menu in real time).

In order to complete this stage you need to "buy" more powerful and sophisticated parts for your creature in order to realistically be able to continue to progress, which takes away from some of the freedom of design.

Later stages are more complex, but not much. Everything really just leads up to the Space stage, in which your civilization builds a spacecraft (custom-designed using the same editing tools as your creature) and you set off to explore the galaxy. Planets are divided into solar systems, and as you leave your own you will run into many other space-faring creatures, as well as ones in earlier stages of development.

The amazing part is that many of the creatures (and building designs and vehicles) you encounter were created by other players. You can even track which players have seen your own creatures. This is by far and away the best reason to keep coming back. Even at this stage gameplay is still repetitive but there are literally thousands of planets to explore as you build your galactic empire. You can even manipulate each planets ecology by adding species of plants and animals picked up from other planets, and manipulate the atmosphere to provide ideal living conditions. There is a lot of replay value here if you are not easily bored by repetitive tasks.

Overall, the game works pretty well, but by the space stage it really makes little difference how you played through the other stages.

There's also the infamous Securom, which installs itself with the game despite being independent software that does not uninstall with it (in fact it is very difficult to uninstall at all). I made sure I knew how to uninstall it beforehand, and so far have not have problems, but I do think there should have been some indication that such intrusive software is being used when you install the game. Performance is completely unaffected.

Storyline- The storyline in this game is kind of iffy, but I would say that for what it is it did well. Each stage is like a chapter in a big book and each little portion of the stage was like a paragraph. The story was linear and logical, what you did affected the next stage like most games nowadays but this one, it more felt like YOU did it. 20/20

Graphics – The graphics are beautiful and incredibly realistic. They show such small details and most of them don’t have corners like other games (IE pixels) Even the most graphically intense games have edges and corners when you get close to something, but this one had NONE not the ground not the trees, not the creatures. This is the graphical quality ALL games should strive toward.10/10

Game play- The game play is pretty intuitive but movement with the keyboard in cell stage is hard, and just doesn’t work right. In latter stages it’s the opposite, who needs the mouse? The keyboard does almost all the work. Of course that’s until the tribal and civilization stages which are very RTS styled. Taking a look at creature, tribe, and civilization stages they are all very similar, because starting a little later in creature stage you get multiple “friends” and from then on its always you and similarly powerful people, of course tribe and civilization stages are RTS so you kind of figure you have multiple people. Finally the space stage, it was kind of fun to play with the planets and make runs with spice, but it was just too different from the game, ALL vehicle customization in combat went out the window and it was only about how it looked. I personally HATE that about the game, going from total customization with weapons health and speed, to only how it looks. I feel I need to make a minor note, the creation portion of the game is FLAWLESS albeit a little lax on parts. 9/15

Enjoy ability- I had a lot of fun with the game up until space stage. Cell stage was really fun because it was like an isometric action game. The creature stage was an interesting FPA. The thing I found most fun about Creature stage was the view, I loved that I could see my friends and my own little herd up close. I also liked flying off of high mountains and just seeing what was going on. But sadly when I hit space stage it just went downhill, it got tedious and repetitive, and all around annoying, it was a great idea, but your so called “allies” were so weak it made them useless, and just not too fun. 16/20

Art direction- The trees were both oddly realistic and fantastically unreal. The planets were great, spheres that had mountain ranges and oceans that looked beautiful, though I wonder about the evident artistic choice of making the water not see through at all. 9/10

Sound &VA- The voices when your little guys are talking are just so awesomely cute I would put it on a CD and sell it! The voice are cute and garbled it’s not English but it’s definitely a language.10/10

Length- Well…. It pains me to say but SHORT! This game is so short it was unbelievable, if you spend about 30 minutes on cell stage and then 2 hours per level after, then another 5- infinite you get about 11.5 hours of play, but I guess you could play space forever if you had that kind of patience… and don’t mind not getting badges!13/15

Total-77/100

Bottom-line- Get the game, it’s great, it’s fun, and even if you hate the game you will spend 10,000 hours playing with the creature creators, but i would say wait till its around 19.99.