When a new big title is on the horizon, I become a hype and media whore. I read all the previews and sift through the message boards reading everything I can about the upcoming game. As Spore approached I began seeing some different criticisms. Usually I ignore this stuff as trolling or bullshit, but I gave this a little more attention. The game had been released over seas before north america and had leaked online, so people had played it. The main criticism that was repeated was a lack of depth in the gameplay (besides the bitching about the DRM). I bought my copy on sunday and have played for the past few days. I only got to the Space stage yesterday and have played about 2 hours into it so these opinions could change.

CELL STAGE


I can't say I was a huge fan of the cell stage. you just swim around eating stuff. Its there to give you a basic primer on how the creature will progress and how the mission structure works, and its effective for that. It looks cool. The graphics are colorful. The gameplay was kind of boring though. Luckily its short so I quickly progressed.

CREATURE STAGE


This is where the game starts to give you some freedom. You throw some legs and a mouth on your creature and then you leave the primordial ooze and head out on land. Here you only do a few things. You meet new creatures and try and kill them or befriend them. You look for body parts laying around. You upgrade your creature. That's about it.

I was a herbivore so I didn't fight much, except in self- defense. I would progress mainly by impressing and befriending other creatures. You do this with a simon says type game. They do one of 4 actions and then you copy it, until a bar fills up and they are impressed. You can fail if your skill in the actions is too low and the bar doesn't fill up fast enough.
Its pretty stupid.

As you find or earn new parts and dna points you can upgrade or change you creature. You get a lot of freedom. sometimes too much. The way I expected this to work was as you reached milestones you could, modify your character, but some of your previous decisions couldn't be changed. It doesn't work like that. Whenever you want to change your character you choose to mate. Then you can change whatever you want. So I could be a green duck with no arms, and just change to a blue walrus with 4 arms. No restrictions. A strange design choice.


TRIBAL STAGE


Next you progress to the tribal stage. Before you entire the tribal stage, you will have the last opportunity to modify the base look of your creature. Once you move forward you are locked in. This stage is a very simplistic RTS style game. The only resource is food and you interact with other tribes in one of two ways. You can make friends with them through gifts or performances or you can attack them. The only personalization options you have in this stage is to put some clothes and decorations on your creature. Once you destroy or befriend enough other tribes you enter the civ stage.

CIVILIZATION STAGE


If you are the creative type and couldn't get enough of the creature creator, then you will love the civ stage. You get access to a handful of creators all as deep and fun if not more so than the creature creator. You get to design different types of buildings and air, land, and sea vehicles. The stage begins by you creating your city hall. I probably spent more time during this stage in the creators than I did actually playing.

The gameplay here is still real basic. You take over other civs either through economic, religious, or military might. It might sound like there is variety, but there isn't. All three methods work the same. You send your religious/economic/military vehicles to another civ and bombard them with propaganda/trade/bombs, until they are defeated. Its disappointing because I wanted all the time I spent creating my buildings and vehicles to have a purpose, but its just superficial.

SPACE STAGE


I am early on in the space stage. I've play a few hours. So far it seems to have a lot of promise. The tutorial missions took longer than any entire previous stage. It seems much deeper than the previous stages, but still shallow compared to the average pc strategy games. Things seem more varied, but It could just be because I have experienced everything yet.


CONCLUSIONS


Spore is not a particularly good game. I am really enjoying it though. Its a unique feeling to have so much control over the appearance and development (at least superficially) of your creature and the world. You will come up with so much stuff that you never could have imagined. You will then encounter other's people stuff which is so different from yours it amazing you were both using the same tools to create them.

The gameplay elements are Spore weakest points. If you don't have interest in the creative aspects of spore, you will most likely get bored of this game very quickly. Its disappointing and I hoped that the breadth of gameplay would match the creative options. It doesn't.

If you loved the creature creator, then you will likely enjoy spore. You have access to many other creators, all that give you such amazing freedom. Its just a shame that most of that freedom only applies to the appearance and not to how the game actually plays.

I'm hoping the space stage scratches the gamer itch for me, so i could recommend Spore to anyone, but until I get confirmation of that, I would only recommend it people who are interested in ground-breaking creative tools built around a fisher-price strategy game.