It takes a perverse labour of love to keep producing clutches of simulation games but Will Wright has reliably been churning out a whole assembly of them for nearly two decades, resulting in one of the most well-received franchises in the industry. His newest pet project, Spore, offered real genre-hopping simulation: it’s part MMO, part RTS, part Sandbox game, and features some of the most impressive character design possibilities in any game that I’ve seen. This would be great if the thing was actually any fun to play. Instead Spore is more of a high-concept creature creator that straddles the divide between “creative” and “almost stunningly dull”, relying on hours of grinding through tedious mini games just so you can rack up enough money to buy a new leg to grow in the middle of your creature’s face.



You start the game playing a cell in what amounts to a ten-minute-long eating simulator with all the tedium that implies. Your main goal may as well be to loiter around aimlessly until something that you’re able to digest accidentally bumps in to you because the controls are too horrible to even bother with. I literally covered my cell’s body with spikes and sat around while poor, unsuspecting protoplasm filleted themselves on my face as they swam by. It took about eight minutes of floating around but in between hurtling myself against pieces of broken meteor enough times to somehow become sentient, and eating the remains of my filleted peers I was finally able to leave my watery, Java applet-worthy purgatory. This entire section seems to only really serve as piss-poor exposition for the rest of the game because once you get on land anything you took from your cell stage naturally becomes completely useless to you.

But what it leads to is probably the one impressive part of the whole abysmal game: the character creator. Thanks to the truly amazing character customisation options you have almost limitless design possibilities. With this I was able to plan out as evolutionarily hopeless a creature as I could devise and set him off on the world to see how long he could survive, and thus Theresa was born. My species amounted to a bulbous, bowling pin disaster whose head was cracked all the way back so his eyes faced in the opposite direction at all times. Two arm stumps grew out of his neck like massive pinkie fingers and he was held up by two more fleshy pegs which made him pretty much too inept to do anything other than spasm around silently. For finishing touches I left him completely hairless. When I was done Theresa looked like a cross between a Vienna sausage and a Thanksgiving turkey.



The second phase of evolution seems to involve more horrible point-and-click navigation as you stumble across herds of creatures that look like they’ve crawled out of a drainage lagoon. At this stage you can choose from two equally non-entertaining game tactics: to befriend them or to attack them. If you're starting to feel increasingly apprehensive about the game then don't worry, your anxiety is well founded. Spore's creature phase raises the bar of almost cripplingly boring game play to unparalleled heights by catering to the niche fan-base of people who have been waiting for a game to fulfill their intense desire for a weirdly grueling series of Simon Says. Befriending other species requires what feels like an endless chain of miming dances and posing for your peers in hopes to somehow impress them. After doing this innumerable times you can enlist the help of fellow genetic-reject mercenaries on your road to befriending and attacking countless others. Considering Theresa had no hands his attacks were limited to somehow biting his attackers with his perpetually upright grimace and after wandering around for a few minutes my creature was killed by some kind of walking bee. Getting killed at this stage just reloads your last save, but because it’s so mind bogglingly easy to retrace your steps there is almost no consequence to dying whatsoever.



By both the tribe and civilisation stage your creature is stuck with the same design and characteristic you gave it during its original creature phase, only you can give them hats now. Both tribe and civilisation stages are nearly indistinguishable in their real-time strategy game play but bizarrely it’s during the RTS that you realise there’s no real strategy involved at all aside from flinging troops in to battle endlessly in an effort to make it to the final sandbox phase: Space. This probably sounds deceptively non-horrible to those of you casual gamers who just want simplicity for simplicity’s sake. But with the vast amount of stupid, repetitive simplicity this game is just shy of causing me physical pain.

In the end Spore is essentially the “man against nature” of sim games in that it is a constant battle against the natural forces of irritation and boredom just to keep playing. It benefits almost entirely from its creature creator mechanic but the actual game elements come across as badly composed filler.