After a long wait, Will Wright’s much anticipated game is finally out. Or well, it will be officially in 2 days. Whether it has been worth the wait is… a really hard question. There are 5 stages of development or evolution in the game, and they give a diverse gameplay experience for young and old. Some of it seems more fit for young than for old though. Let’s just go through them eh?


Cell stage
You all know the standard Spore cell stage videos by now. You are a tiny creature, having chosen to be either herbivore or carnivore. A herbivore eats plants and green blobs that give you DNA points, a carnivore eats red blobs and attacks other creatures to eat their red meat blobs for DNA. You can also find abilities like electric shock or poison spit. If you have gathered enough DNA and abilities, you can call a mate to evolve your creature by buying new abilities with the DNA points and then putting them on your creature. It plays like a 2D top-down flash game, but it’s pretty fun and all of the creatures make hilarious sounds whenever you are attacking them or chasing them.


Everytime you eat enough DNA to fill a section on the DNA/experience bar, you grow in size too. With size comes the ability to eat bigger creatures. It’s basically Feeding Frenzy with upgrades. When you have filled your DNA bar, you can progress to Creature stage. You can add a small selection of legs and features to your creature and it will make landfall, hurray!


Creature stage
Now that you are on land, things are in 3D. You now have a nest where new creatures spawn and where you go to mate/upgrade your creature. The gameplay is pretty much the same as before, only in 3D. You now hunt animals to eat them, or look for plants and evade other creatures of you are a herbivore. I chose a carnivore, so I just harassed a lot of creatures for DNA and became stronger and stronger through beating them. If you kill a set amount of one type of creature (4-7 usually), you can make that type of creature go extinct and it nets you a DNA bonus.

On the world, you can find new upgrades by digging them up/clicking on things on the ground or by eliminating enemies and making them extinct. This way, you can make your creature get abilities like Charge, Strike and Spit. These can be assigned in WoW fashion to the 1-4 keys. Or you can assign social abilities to your creature, like Sing, Dance and errr.. I forgot because it was pretty lame. If you play the peaceful herbivore route, you can impress other creatures by making contact and mimicking their interactions. Basically it means you have 2-3 skills and just select the skill that the opposing creature used in a Simon Says style. It’s kinda cute for one time only, but you’re better off just slaughtering them all.

With DNA progression also comes the ability to create a pack. Once you impressed some other creatures of your kind with your social skills, they will follow you and attack others with you. The great thing here is that it automatically makes you adapt to pack hunting patterns. You’ll find yourself evading big groups of tougher creatures and trying to pick of stray ones. Then again, when you only need to kill 1 more creature of a type to make them go extinct, you can just rush into combat, kill a baby and watch their protectors vanish in extinction. Who says suicide runs don’t work?

When you have a big pack and moved to your own nest, you can progress to the next Tribal stage.


Tribal Stage
In this stage, you are done evolving. Yep, this is where Spore stops being about evolving your creature and where you can no longer add weird arms and eyes everywhere. Which is actually pretty lame.

Tribal stage requires you to upgrade your creature with armor rather than bodyparts. The key is to collect food from hunting/gathering instead of collecting DNA. Your tribe consists of a main hut where you can buy babies for 10 food, and a few predetermined slots to build buildings on for more food. Most of these will be locked at start, and will be unlocked once you have acquired/destroyed rival tribes. There are competing tribes in the world, which you can either destroy or socialize with. The social path leads to cooperation and kinda taking their tribe over as good capitalists.

What is plays out like is this: you build a fishermen hut and a first weapon hut. Then you assign one or two tribesmen to grab a fishing pole at the building and then assign them to go fish somewhere. They will then gather food automatically and you will never have to look there again. You can take the remaining tribesmen to kill creatures for food and take it back to town. It’s really a slow gather process and you’ll never want to do it unless you run out of food resource.

Then you just select all creatures and attack the enemy town. Destroy their town hall and they will be dead. You get a few new buildings and upgrades for your tribe’s armor and repeat it till you are the sole ruler.

That’s all there is to Tribe stage, it’s a bit less interesting than the first few and it becomes generic in gameplay terms pretty fast. But the progress bar makes you want to keep playing it just to see what is next.


Civilization stage
So now you are in Civ stage. This is really really awkward because they mix a lot of gameplay elements that don’t necessarily mix well.

Your tribe is now a city, in Battle For Middle Earth style. You have predetermined slots to build either a House (more population), Factory (less happiness and more income), Entertainment (adds happiness) and a turret (defense). Link a house and a factory together on the grid, and you will get extra income and more unhappiness. Link two houses to a factory, and the bonus is even higher. Link entertainment to your houses and the city will remain happy, etc etc. You just put down two factories, two houses and two entertainment hubs and you will never have to look again. Not the deepest of city management sims in any case.



The worst part (for me) was that you have to design all of these buildings before you can place them! You can create what your house, factory and entertainment looks like. Nothing you do matters, so I just ended up making silly block houses. The thing is that you are forced to make one with at least 3 building units, but you never look at it so it’s pretty useless. Now if you are a Sims fan, you might enjoy this part. But then you’ll still never look at your city.

As a warrior, you will build land, sea and air units. You design all of these with weapons and everything, and they actually have an impact on speed/damage/health so it’s a bit more fun to design these. When I say units though, I mean that you have 1 land unit, 1 sea unit and 1 air unit to kill stuff with. What happens is: you build 10 of land units, send them to a rival city and wait till they are destroyed. Then you build the same two factories/houses/entertainment buildings in that city and make the money flow harder. Then you repeat that, on sea or air if you must.

You can also create Religious or Economic cities as you capture them. Religious units need to be designed all over again, and they are worthless. They function by nullifying the effects of entertainment hubs and more or less making the rival city revolt. But it’s a very slow process and there’s no reason not to bombard them instead. Speaking of which, there are a couple of world map weapons you can instantly use for a set amount of money. You can set an air strike on a city to help the attack and stuff like that. Or you can send out ICBM’s to all rival cities. I didn’t really know what this did until I did it, but it makes you win the stage instantly for a relatively low amount of cash. Errr, kinda cool I guess.


Space stage
So after 4-5 hours, you are now in Space! That’s it, you have seen all of Spore. There is a lot do to in space though, which has all been done better in other Space games. You can trade, which doesn’t quite work as it does in other games. You can easily navigate the galactic map by zooming in over a planet you are at and ending up flying on the planet. You can buy colony pods to colonize planets, terraform them, capture animals on one planet and beam them down on another to add more biodiversity. You can pretty much play God in Space.

There are other races to interact with, but with no real tech tree and a lack of depth on all fronts, it’s the question how long you’ll keep doing it. I gave up after an hour and a half because it was getting light outside. Then again, I’ve been playing those kind of games for years now starting with Master of Orion 1. There is enough to do, there’s just not a whole lot of depth to it in terms of gameplay progression. There is depth in the options you have to shape the universe in your image, but it will depend on how much you like stuff like that to play this game for a long time.


Conclusion
The first few stages of Spore are really great to play and it’s fun to nourish your creature towards evolutionary dominance. Once it has evolved though, the game becomes a bit shallow. It’s still hugely addictive because everything progresses so fast, but it actually moves a bit too fast. Especially if you have played a lot of PC games before, the latter half of Spore won’t really grab you that much. The herbivore and carnivore paths give you some replayability through gameplay variation, but other than that it’s pretty much up you and how much you like to screw around to build your creature.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a good game though. It’s highly polished and it’s evident that a lot of thought and love went into this project. It’s also a great game for kids, provided they won’t get caned by the priest, for playing a game based around evolution. Since the game starts with a cosmic event triggering life on the planet, it leaves some safe room for ‘Intelligent’ Design and all that. It’s just that if you are used to RTS and strategy games, the second half of Spore will not remain very interesting for very long. I can see myself going back to create a new creature and fuck around with it, but not like Civ where you just keep on playing and playing and playing. I'll probably grow bored with it after playing through it all the way as a carnivore/militarist and a herbivore/pacifist once. It's not like a different skin on your creature will change the game in any big ways.

The variation in the game comes from your creative input in the creature design, not from the gameplay variation itself. As such, there’s probably less variation than The Sims because even in that game the environment changes had a big impact on how your little family grew up. In Spore, once you reach the Space Stage, you will see so many planet types and creature types, that creating your own new one will not feel like that big of a contribution to the grand scheme. Perhaps that’s a nice humble way of looking at life on Earth, but it sure doesn’t make for the best game ever.

Finally, the game runs pretty well on older systems in case you were wondering. I ran it fine with medium/medium-high settings on an Athlon64 3000+/1GB ram/X800XT 256MB gfx card.

7/10 for PC veterans
8/10 for general gamers or anyone with the creative gene
10/10 for your kid, provided you force it to play the game :)