Be Excellent To Each Other

Spore Review
For PC

By Nervous Pete

Ouch, it’s painful to write this.

Spore isn’t a very good game, really.

No, really. The game I’d be looking forward to for months, and the magnum opus that more attentive gamers had been eagerly awaiting for years, isn’t very good.

You won’t realise this at first. Your first play through will be full of “oohs” and “aahs” at the miracles of creation you encounter, and at the glorious vast scope of the game. And it's also because the creature creator and the other three creators that you use to dream up vehicles, buildings and spaceships are so flexible and fun that you can easily lose hours to them and then proudly show off your creations to others. Yes, you will have fun. The problem is the mission mechanics of the actual game are so limiting that whatever you create will be limited to doing the same basic things over and over again. And the game will ask you to do these very things again and again. Oh, how it will ask. And what was a pretty fun play through will in hindsight be a cunningly disguised tedium, and the motivation to play again will drain out of you like life-energy after a fraught and tense driving lesson.

There are five stages in Spore and each is admittedly fun to play through the first time around. The game opens with a meteorite smashing into the primordial soup of your planet. You ‘hatch’ as a little amoeba with cute eyes. You then proceed to munch on flora or fauna whilst avoiding bigger creatures. As you play you collect ‘DNA’ points and grow in size, the rest of the world shifting in scale around you in a rather neat way. It’s terribly similar to Flow, but this is no bad thing. You get rather attached to your critter and learn how to use a stripped down creature creator.

In time you grow legs (or not) and waddle onto land for the Creature Stage. This is genuinely a thrilling moment as a huge round planetoid is waiting for you to explore, packed with other players' creatures! Well, in theory other players, a good 9/10ths of what I encountered were created by Maxis team staff, and they don’t seem to be very creative or artistic compared to Joe & Jane Public. So you choose to go the path of carnivore or herbivore – a choice that will have ramifications later in the game. If you go carnivore, then you encounter other species and press number keys to kill them. If you go herbivore then you encounter other species and press number keys to – erm – befriend them. There is still fun to be had though. The engine is a miracle in that in almost whatever you design your creature’s motions will be amusing. It is a joy to see your little bouncing wonder make friends and run away from scary Epic sized creatures.

When you’ve grown in size and added more limbs, eyes and so forth, the game decides you’re ready to advance to the Tribal Stage. This is exactly the same as the Creature Stage but in an RTS-light framework with a basic resource management. There’s a clothing editor that’s almost entirely superfluous, though it was neat adding a handlebar moustache which made my ‘Sherbert Lemon’ creature look a bit like singer songwriter Lee Hazlewood. Basically it’s more of the same, wiping out other species or befriending them. To befriend you have to play musical instruments as per their request, which involves yet more number key hitting.

Then it’s on to the Civilisation Stage. This is like the preceding stage, only now you have three paths to travel in uniting your fragmented race. Build units that blow up the enemy, or play music at the enemy until they – erm – blow up, or shower coins on the enemy until they convert to your side or – ah – blow up. It’s basically the same thing but with different graphics. It’s neat seeing your big world zoomed out for what it is now, and the stage is kind of fun first time round, especially with the new editors. I created a sort of Aldous Huxley design of utopian buildings for my cities. They were immensely fun to craft and I felt proud of their individuality. There’s but three types of building, not including City Hall – housing, entertainment and factory – and you have to juggle them around their various slots to get the best happiness and production. Still, it gives a modest amount of head-scratching. I created some neat units too, a flying zeppelin-boat and an age of sail frigate. They looked pretty neat and colourful, and I sort of wistfully wanted to live on the zeppelin-boat myself.

So, once again you convert the enemy cities, capture them or buy them with charmingly idiosyncratic graphics, but with the absolutely samey game mechanic.

So onto space! First design your UFO. This is awesome; I spent hours on my UFO trying to make it the biggest and bulkiest possible, as I wanted the feel of a whole bunch of Lee Hazlewood look-alikes zooming around in it. The ship looked a plausible, utilitarian design but with sleek lines and shaped sort of like a sea-horse. You are greeted by mission control and take the first of many missions. These involve exploring new planets, scanning life-forms and abducting aliens. It also involves trading and rather wonderfully terraforming. Yes, terraforming involves altering barren planets until they can support colonies. It’s a glorious test tube where you throw ice comets and oxygen units at hunks of rocks, plant abducted flora and fauna and pray for the right ‘Goldilocks’ combination. And there’s thousands upon thousands of these planets in a vast galaxy that boggles the mind. On a good half of them are other species, created by other players – or once again in my game mainly inexplicably Maxis. (And yes, my game was hooked up online to Sporepedia and a couple of Sporecasts.) You can create trade routes with them, alliances or go to war against them. You can even blow up planets!

It’s a shame then that the space stage does everything in its power to piss you off.

No matter how many colonies you have for example, you have to visit them to manage them. This means an infinity of zooming in and out with the mousewheel and holding down the right mouse button to zip along the space lanes. And you will be doing a lot of this, because if you’ve chosen the pacifist herbivore route like I have, then the game assumes you want happy-fun-pirate time and launches an unpreventable pirate attack against your richest colony. Defeating these pirates means dropping everything your doing and frantically zooming there before they destroy your buildings. Amazingly, they and other baddies can damage you as you mousewheel down through a system into the planet view, but you can’t damage them. Then as soon as you’re zoomed into planet view you get immediately blown up by a half dozen ships. You respawn. Damage one enemy and get blown up again. Respawn, blow up two enemies and respawn. Finally you destroy all of them and repair and refuel your vessel. You can get allies to help you with this, but I only ever managed to accumulate one, as every time I was away trying to do missions to make friends cocking pirates would attack again and I’d be forced to drop everything.

It’s irritating because the combat mechanics aren’t bad, sort of a skittish 3D Defender zooming over the planet thrillingly. But it feels ultimately so pointless, because no matter how many pirates you blow up you know they will be back mere minutes later. And even if you seed your planet with defence turrets they’re no use, and don’t even start firing back until you visit the planet yourself. Incredible. Even the big fleet of units sits happily by as pirates ravage your planet. Of course, if you attack anyone else you get mauled by turrets and planet-based units. IT’S THAT SORT OF GAME.

If you take the carnivore route by the way to avoid all this, it constantly spawns an ‘ecological’ disaster mission instead, in which you have to zoom back to your homeworld to zap stinky-yellow clouded ‘ill’ creatures. It is less irritating, but still hugely irritating.

And it really is a game breaker for me. There’s a whole galaxy out there and I’m playing nursemaid. You don’t feel at all like the Emperor of a space-faring race, or an intrepid explorer. Instead you feel like a nanny rushing around cleaning up spills and scolding children. Even if you get the excellent bomb-wot-blows-up-planets you still get treated like a scum fagging for a prefect. This results in you hating the very guts of your mate’s creations, instead of loving them, and subsequently leaving far fewer comments via Sporepedia than you anticipated. Even when you have nothing but love for a creation, you’re kept so busy you can’t take time to savour the imagination on offer. The game design is too bloody minded and petty to allow that.

The game could still be great. There’s amazing potential locked away within the engine. A lot of the interface problems of the space stage could be fixed easily. Enable your colonies to be managed distantly. Allow you to remotely hook into ‘planetary defences’ and shoot down pirates and invaders. But until they release a patch to deal with the identikit mission that spawns every eight minutes, and until they give you more mission types and things to see you’re basically playing a very big, very shallow and very irritating game.

And there’s only one save slot, and no autosave. Which is great when, say for example, you accidentally abduct an ally’s creature instead of the plant they were pointing to and they declare war on you after spending a painstaking half hour wooing them. For example.

Spore promised you could tell your own story. The only story I can think of is, “How the Amazing Lemon Sherbert left the ocean, evolved and took to the stars, and how they got really fecked off with cocking pirates and wished they never left their happy plippy-ploppy primordial ooze to start with.”

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Maybe if I play it again it’ll click. And I will. After all, I did have lots of fun up to space stage, with plenty of pleasing surprises and laughs. But soon as I hit space stage I became incredibly annoyed, and began to realise that my next epic evolutionary adventure would be immensely repetitive with only the creators and their creations as a saving grace.

Verdict: 6/10

Fun first time round but does everything it can to dissuade replay in any capacity other than the creators. A bit like having the world’s best sandbox and a bucket and spade on a sunny day, with a tub of tasty ice-cream. Only with a bunch of whining kids and a cloud of wasps distracting you from your art and feasting as a largely mute crowd looks on stolidly refusing to comment on your works of wonder.


Comments? Ta.

Nice review. I haven't played the game, but I can imagine why it is like this way. The nursemaid thing sounds exactly how the Sims ended up being.

Very nice review. This week's Zero Punc was on about it too.

Sounds pretty spot on to me. Nice review, chap.

I haven't played it since a few days after buying it. I just can't be arsed with the constant nursing. I've lent the whole thing to a friend instead, who has now had my game longer than I have. Maybe we're broken, like Gaywood.

Hold it, Jessie! Every stage has three permanent 'class' outcomes.

Here's mine

And I shall read yours tomorrow, it's bed time now.

Isn't there like a reviews section up there somewhere?

Malc

There is, but I'm a whore for comments.

Nay bad review Mr LewieP, though it seems the annoyances got under my skin more than yours. There is depth there, you just have to wade through a lot of shallows to get to it, and then when you get there everyone on the beach starts shouting at you in bellowing fashion to go get them ice-creams and shift their clothes from the tide and things.

It is a fantastic engine, and an important game, it's just not a very fun one.

FTFY

Patch out!

Addresses some issues, but not enough. Nethertheless I shall boot up Spore again tomorrow and see if its any better.



EDIT:

*Cough* Slight quibbles on the official forum over the stability of the patch here: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/spor ... le-pc.html

Golly gosh, it almost sounds like it's the new Black & White - massively hyped 'be a god' game from a well-respected creator, that has a protracted development period while the internet and journos alike wank themselves up so much froth that all that remains of them is a pair of eyes peering out from the froth... and then the game comes out and after an initially entertaining first few hours you soon realize you've seen all there is to see and the remaining game is a tedious, repetitive slog of flawed, hateful game mechanics and broken dreams.

*gaaaaaasp*

Hell, the whole 'nanny your planets' thing sounds exactly like the tree-farming and house-building/breed controlling of Black & White.

Oh well... at the risk of being a heretic, I wasn't really looking forward to it that much, as I couldn't really see how all the promises of total flexibility and such could possibly be programmed into a game. Still, the world was won over by the big eyed amoebas, the inevitable penis monsters and the inevitable 'well, we're better than this' jokes ABOUT penis monsters.