The Avid Coder

I had high hopes for Spore. After Will Wright’s success with The Sims and The Sims 2 and their respective collosal lists of expansion packs one cannot be blamed for suspecting that Will Wright knows a thing or two about making games. So when Spore was announced I immediately started paying attention. As more and more details emerged I became ever more excited about the game. A game about evolution? Interesting. You can create and shape the course of your creatures’ evolution? Cool. The final phase will be a massive space-age where you can battle, ally and trade with other races? Wow, yes please. Then they announced what sounded like the gem that would complete this would-be crown of a game: your creations, those of your friends and every other player will be shared through an online service, free of charge. This means endless free content, every planet could be truly unique: populated with life created by countless individuals around the world! This is a game that sounds great on paper, and maybe it was great at some stage during its development as well. What we ended up with though is something that is only half of what we came to expect.

During your first play through of the game you play through five stages of the evolution of your creatures. The first stage is the cell stage where you basically muck about in the primordial soup. In Spore you can choose whether your creatures are herbivores, carnivores or omnivores. As a carnivore you can hunt other creatures, that is your primary source of food. As a herbivore you search for proper food sources floating about in the soup and obviously as an omnivore you can eat whatever you want. Based on your style of play the game also determines the general personality of your creatures. If you kill a lot of other creatures you are aggressive. If you make a lot of allies you are friendly and so forth. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to be a carnivore and be friendly, you have to kill to eat so ultimately you end with super aggressive militaristic creatures. If you are a herbivore you can kill, but why bother, it is easier to just eat and run away if there is any danger. So you mostly end up with super friendly creatures, although in the later stages you can shift your tactics to become more aggressive.

In the second stage, called the creature stage, your creatures evolve onto land. In this stage you must interact with other creatures. If you are a carnivore you have to hunt and kill other creatures since that is your primary source of food. If your creatures are herbivores or omnivores you can avoid the combat almost completely by eating fruit that is available throughout the world. This stage also introduces the first social contact between different species. To advance in the creature stage you either have to ally with other species or wipe them out. In order to ally with some creatures you play a game of monkey-see-monkey-do: your potential friends perform some dance or singing routine and you have to mimic it with your creature. Unforunately this is the most boring gameplay element I have ever seen and it becomes utterly infuriating after the third time you do it. Thus the depth of the creature phase: hunt or sing and dance. Oh yes, I almost forgot, you do pick up random body parts scattered around the world that you can then add to your creature everytime you breed.

The third phase is the tribal phase. The various species of creatures on your planet now have small villages. The goal in this phase is the same as in the previous phase: kill or befriend the other species. You can build some basic buildings to obtain weapons, or musical instruments to impress other tribes. You also gather food by hunting or fishing and have to protect it from theft by other tribes or wild creatures. Again, like the creature phase, there is no real depth here.

The fourth phase is the civilisation phase. Your single species has now evolved into the dominant species on the planet. The planet is populated with a number of cities and you start with one. In this phase you can design your structures much like you can create your own creatures. This is fairly interesting and in this phase you start to have some fun. Depending on where your city is located you can build land vehicles or sea vehicles. It is important to note that depending on your style of play through the earlier phases your nation can be either militaristic, economic or religous. A militaristic nation can construct combat vehicles and capture other cities by force. The religous type projects some religious hologram and converts the cities to their cause. The economic nation cannot construct combat vehicles, only trade vehicles (unless they capture militaristic cities) and must trade with other cities and eventually buy them. As you capture more and more cities you unlock some special abilities. As an example: the militaristic nation gets various rockets. One type basically captures cities instantly. The most advanced types allows you to beat the civilisation phase by basically blowing up all of the remaining enemy cities. As with the other phases when the civilisation phase comes to an end you are left wanting more. It does not really have much depth. As with the first three phases the civilastion phase can be played through very quickly. It seems that the intent of the first four stages is really to create your creature: you create the appearance and the personality of your creatures through your gameplay.

The fifth stage is the space stage. This is the stage that is supposed to truly make the game. In the space stage you can travel between planets and stars. You find other space-faring species among the stars that can become either friend or foe (except for those that are just immediately hostile, the first communication with them is something like: “Hi, we are going to destroy you now. Its nothing personal, if we don’t do it someone else will.”).

In the space stage relationships with other races generally follow the following trend: do some missions for them to become friends, trade with them, ally with them and then potentially get a ship from them to join your fleet. The missions they offer you are all very similar and basically involve flying to some planet and killing or abducting some creatures.

The space stage has quite a variety of items you can buy and trade. Among these are rare artifacts and artifact sets, weapons for your ship, spices mined on your colonies (spice trading is your primary source of income). Trading can become tiresome though, as you have to fly to numerous stars and planets to try and find good prices for your items, since almost everyone seems to try and cheat you or something.

An important task in the space stage is to expand your species’ empire. This can be accomplished by trading with allies and then buying their planets, capturing enemy colonies by force or by terraforming and colonising planets yourself. The latter can be quite an expensive prospect as the equipment needed to properly terraform and colonise planets are … well, expensive.

If you have enemies in the space stage, or if any of your allies have enemies in the space stage your/their colonies will be attacked every so often (waaayy to frequently). This involves dropping what you are doing, racing over there and destroying the attackers. Then you have to visit each of your cities to rebuild any buildings that may have been destroyed in the attack. This can get a bit tedious and a city or planet governer that automatically rebuilds destroyed buildings could have been helpful.

This is very much a sandbox game and to some extent a social networking game. Some of the funniest and best moments I had in the game was seeing how a spaceship that one of my friends created visits my planet and abducts some of my creatures. In my game I found his creatures on a remote planet and I swooped in and abducted some of them (and dropped some of them to their deaths … by accident, really). But that is it. That is where it stops. You create a creature, its fun and exciting. You get to the space stage and start exploring a bit. Great. You find some of your friends’ creations in your universe, and you hear stories of them finding some of your stuff. Cool and funny, but that is all. Don’t get me entirely wrong here, the game is not a total disaster, it is enjoyable the first time you play it. It is fun until a couple of hours into the space stage when you realise that the repetition is going to kill you.

Spore had the makings of an excellent game but it seems to have been dumbed down a bit along the way. Possibly the gameplay was simplified, the depth lessened, in order to appeal to a wider audience, I don’t know. I just know that this could have been a much better game than it turned out to be. I guess the ultimate question is, is it fun? Yes, for the first couple of hours at least.