Spore Review

There are a few games this year that are attracting the attention of the gaming world and Will Wright's Spore is one of these. Creators of the Sims series, Maxis have done rather well over the years and this is a big title for EA. The Creature Creator, which was released as a stand-alone product, gave gamers a taste of what was to come in the full game and it’s gone down well, despite the influx of boob and willy creature movies that appeared on the Interweb.

The premise behind Spore is to create a civilisation from the ground up starting with the Cell Phase. In fact it's so in-depth that you start out as a single celled organism swimming about in murky pools which makes up the first part of the game. By eating your way to a new level and picking up body enhancements you can add new body bits to your organism. Throughout this process players mate with other organism which are the same species as your creation, and once mating occurs you can enhance your organism with different traits such as fins, spikes, poison or electricity for attacking other organisms. This whole process takes about 20 minutes and feels rather repetitive.



Assuming you've done everything right, and you can’t really go wrong, players then migrate to land on the planet they chose right at the start of the game, this is the Creature phase of the game. Once on land the development process begins again but this time it's all about searching for other creatures and either attacking or befriending them to enhance your DNA and improve your own creature race.

When exploring other creatures are encountered, some will be easy to defeat and others will send you back to the creature creator to come up with something a little more powerful to defeat them. This part of the game is all very cutesy with lots singing, dancing and posing to impress others. It's kind of like playing a very cute MMORPG with skill bars for actions or attacks while collecting DNA points to spend on improving your creature. The Creature phase is longer than the previous phase but again, can feel very repetitive.



As you can see there's a pattern emerging and next comes the Tribal Phase where the game starts to get a little more interesting. Your creatures now have bigger brains, and items such as weapons and musical instruments come available to either aid you in attacking or charming the other inhabitants of your created world.

At this point he game changes into RTS mode and after the first couple of phases this comes as a slight surprise as the control and view system changes slightly to a standard RTS viewpoint and control method. Again, this phase is relatively short, especially if an aggressive stance is taken. I will say going the aggressive route appears to be a lot easier than trying to ally with the other races on the planet.

Like almost every other RTS under the sun, resources are important to keep your tribe happy and food is the currency at this level of the game. Send out the tribe, kill some unsuspecting wild animals and feed your tribe. The tribe can then produce new babies for the price of 10 food and once you’ve around 10-12 tribe members you can go on the charm offensive, or rampage, depending on which route you take. It wasn’t long before all other tribes were eliminated by destroying their main hut and it was time to move onto the Civilsation phase of the game.

Sticking in an RTS-like mode, this phase adds air, sea and land vehicles and a full global view of the planet. Again we took a war-mongering stance and started creating our first land vehicles and city. Using the building creator you design your main city building, entertainment, factories and housing structures. Factories make your population unhappy while entertainment buildings increase their happiness so a balance needs to be found.

A new resource also comes into play, Spice (homage to Dune?). This new source of wealth vents from the ground and these nodes, which are dotted around the planet, are ‘captured’ by one of your vehicles. This then provides a steady stream of income to create more vehicles and improve your cities.

The Civilisation level was actually quite easy to complete as an aggressor. After a few land attacks with souped-up buggies sporting big guns and knocking out the blue civilization, air vehicles became an option. With so much Spice pouring in, thanks to capturing all the Spice nodes early on, air vehicles could be churned out and it was simply a matter of flying around the planet and eradicating every civilization that had dare set their foot on the IncGamers World. Die scum!