Spore Review

Spore is the highly anticipated game from the minds of Will Wright and Maxis. Spore received a lot press and hype leading up to it's release. As a result, expectations were high. In all of the demos Will Wright gave, the graphics and sounds seemed a little silly, but the game's concept did sound interesting. But, does it live up to the hype? The general concept of the game is to take a single cell and evolve it into a creature capable of running a galactic empire. This happens over 5 phases. Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization and Space. Your creature's behavior within those phases effects how it evolves and which abilities it gets access to in later phases. For example, if it only eats meat as a single cell organism, it gets access to carnivore only abilities in the creature phase that assist it in killing other creatures. Herbivores get abilities that help them make friends with other creatures more easily.

Once your creature makes it to the creature phase, the path of herbivore, carnivore or omnivore is set. So, you need to make that decision early in the game. However, in order to get access to the bonus abilities, the creature's behavior must match it's chosen path. So, there's no starting out as a carnivore and then moving to more peaceful behavior. Your creature will still be able to make friends with others as a carnivore, but they benefit more from eating others.

Tide Pool Phase This is one of my favorite phases of Spore. I think it is a little short, but it is a good intro to the basics. Basically, you swim around in a tide pool doing what cells do. Eat and try to survive. As you eat you get to evolve and gain traits that help you eat and survive. These traits include "speed jets" to help you escape, an ink cloud that poisons other creatures and spikes that can be used for offense or defense depending on where they are positioned on your creature.

How your creature behaves here determines whether it is a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore for the rest of the game. Choose wisely. Once your creature evolves enough, it develops legs to walk on land and moves to the next phase and there is no turning back.

Creature Phase This is my favorite phase of Spore. Your creature is now on dry land and has to interact with other creatures in order to progress. These interactions are dependent on how your creature has evolved so far. Luckily, your creature is not alone. Your creature lives at a nest with others of its kind. As your creature progresses, it will gain companions from the nest to help with its goals.

The goals your creature needs to accomplish depend on what kind of creature it is. Carnivores have to commit genocide, herbivores have to be the peacekeeper and omnivores get to be something in the middle. As your creature reaches its goals, it evolves and eventually reaches the next phase. It sounds basic, but it can be a lot more complicated that it sounds. There are a number of different paths and challenges available.

Tribal Phase This is arguably the worst phase in Spore. By now your creature is set in its physical evolutionary path. The only way your creature can "evolve" now is through equipment like clothing and weapons. The theme continues here with herbivores being peaceful, carnivores being aggressive and omnivores being somewhere in-between.

How your creature moves on to the next phase is just like the creature phase. The graphics are just different and you have to worry about aggressive tribes coming to kill you. Thankfully, this phase is fairly quick.

Civilization Phase This is arguably the other worst phase in Spore. It doesn't matter if your creature is a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore. The game play is the same. Gather resources, design your vehicles, build large groups of those vehicles and swarm your competition. Maxis has patched Spore to fix how easy this phase is, but they didn't do a good job. It's still basically the same. Once your creature conquers the world, they build a spaceship and move out into the Final Frontier...

Space Phase This phase of Spore is very close to being my favorite phase. You fly around in your custom designed spaceship visiting other planets and races. The objective is the same for everyone, to reach the center of the galaxy while colonizing as many planets as possible. It doesn't sound very exciting, but it can be. As you visit other planets, you run into other races who might be as advanced as your creature. You can try to make friends with them by trading with them or doing jobs for them. Or you can skip the being "friends" part and wage war on them. Races you make alliances with will lend you a spaceship to add to your fleet. The larger your fleet, the easier it is to wage war and fight off pirates.

You may also run into other races that aren't as advanced as your creature. How you treat them is up to you. You can let them be, make "first contact" or commit genocide so you can colonize their planet (you can't colonize a planet with sentient life on it already). If you don't want to go the evil kill 'em all route, you can terraform non-habitable planets and colonize them when they have reached a more hospitable environment. This takes time and some trial and error, but it is fun and satisfying once your get a colony up and running.

My only real complaint with the space phase is your inability to build more spaceships and create more fleets. As your empire expands, you have to defend your planets from hostile races or pirates. This gets to be very time consuming running around defending your planets with one fleet. Cities on a planet can build defenses, but they are usually inadequate for larger attack forces. The ability to create planetary defense fleets would help a lot.

Does Spore live up to the hype? Not really, but no game could have. Spore is a good game overall. Some of the phases are not well developed, but they are short enough to not be big detractors. The Creature and Space phases make up for the weaker phases with diverse and entertaining game play. Also, the patches Maxis has come out with so far to fix the weaker phases have made some improvements. The creator creator portion is almost a game in itself and provides hours of entertainment trying to figure how off the wall you can make your creatures.

It looks like Maxis is looking to turn Spore into another Sims-like franchise and will be cranking out the add-ons and expansions. Spore also allows people to share their creations and saves Maxis a lot of time and effort in the create content department. So, I suspect Spore will have a long life and is a good entertainment investment for the next few years. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to teaching Killer III how to catch and eat the slower and weaker creatures in the tide pool. --Gimpy Knee I hope you have found my Spore Review helpful. You can find other game reviews at www.GimpyKneeReviews.com