Sleepy Gamer

It’s no big secret that Will Wright’s next endeavor would be an incredibly ambitious project.  The game, which has won countless trade show awards over the past several years, was aptly called “Sim Everything” for a reason.

Creature Creator.. A Game In Itself

While you don’t immediately start off creating your creature, it’s an activity you’ll find yourself coming back to again and again, throughout your playthrough.  The software tool is easy enough to use for most novice players.  Adding body parts is as simple as clicking and dragging body parts to wherever your twisted mind wants them.  Each added part has several sliders to adjust orientation, size, and length, while the main body can be molded like clay to become longer or shorter, fatter or skinnier.  The only restrictions come in form of forced symmetry by the editor.  Regardless, the sheer amount of user-generated creatures that have already been made is a testament to the power, ease, and usability of the tool.  It should be noted that a free, standalone version of the Spore Creature Creator is available for anyone to try.  You won’t be able to test out your creation in-game, but you can tinker with the tool and get a small taste of what the creative aspect of Spore is all about.

5 Games In 1

Spore is divided into five evolutionary stages (Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space), based on mostly distinct gameplay types.  You advance through the game either by spending a predetermined amount of time in the current stage or by filling up an experience bar at the bottom of the screen, although each stage has its own way of awarding experience points (XP).

The Cell stage has you eating either plant wildlife, if you’re an herbivore, or hunting other animals, if you’re a carnivore, to gain XP.  Both the Creature and Tribal stages have you either befriending other tribes of species or hunting them to extinction, to advance.  In the Civilization stage, you must either convert or ally yourself with the other cities, or destroy them all, to finally unlock your spaceship and explore the galaxy.

While the bulk of the game takes place during the Space stage, you do spend a good deal of time playing each of the initial stages, which can last anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours each.  More experienced gamers will probably find these introductory levels a bit shallow with respect to gameplay depth, which is why some have used the term “mini-game” to describe them.  Both the Cell and Creature stages benefit from the novelty of actively using the creature creator editor to tweak your player-controlled creation.  By the time you get to the Tribal and Civ stages, that interaction is entirely absent, and the seemingly basic goal of massing units to destroy your enemies becomes tiresome.  Midway through the Civ stage, I just wanted it to end so I could start my quest to discover the vastness of space.  Thankfully, you once you reach a stage in Spore, you can always start anew at that point, bypassing all the previous tedium.

Space: The Final Frontier

Now that the appetizer is out of the way, it’s time for the main course!  It’s been said that Spore was designed to be ⅓ game playing, ⅓ creation building, ⅓ community sharing.  Well if that’s the case, then 80-90% of the game aspect takes place in the Space stage, and potentially much, much more.  You control a single spaceship, but the reality is that you will command an intergalactic empire.  Just like everything else in Spore, the primary gameplay has you either conquering the galaxy through economic, religious, or military means (depending on what societal ideology you’ve been following so far throughout the game).  While you can theoretically do whatever you want, it generally breaks down like so: carnivores transition into military powers, omnivores develop into economic empires, and herbivores end up becoming religious regimes.

You begin with a single homeworld within the solar system in which you began life as a single-celled organism.  Your ship carries with it a radio device which can communicate with local planets that you are currently in orbit around.  If you’re friendly or neutral to them, you can also take on quests, negotiate for alliances, establish trade routes, and even directly trade goods, much like you would shop for items in an RPG.  Most of the other races of aliens you will encounter begin with a neutral stance to you, but piss them off long enough and you might turn a potentially, powerful ally into a constantly aggressive foe.  Most quests require you either fetch an artifact off a distant planet’s surface with your tractor beam, preventing an ecological disaster by surgically removing diseased wildlife via your laser beam, or even destroying a rival civilization.  The problem comes when you “accidentally” abduct the wrong civilian or begin a seemingly humanitarian venture to eradicate a life threatening plague by opening fire over a city.  However, the other self-aware aliens don’t take too kindly to this sort of practice, which is why before long, you will probably have half the galaxy banging on your home planet’s door every five minutes with a fleet of ships equipped with death rays.

The repetitive and frustrating urgency to protect my homeworld, my colony bases, and every one of my ally’s planets is my main problem with Spore’s “sandbox” experience.  The fact that you can only control one ship and recruit only a few others to follow you around makes defending or expanding your empire almost unmanageable.  There are just so many things to do and it gets incredibly annoying to have to retreat back to whatever star system is blinking at the moment.

A Billion and One Things to Do

While you start out with a simple mission of exploring the galaxy, the game quickly opens up to a great deal of potential tasks to undertake.  Everything from forming colonies, conquering rival empires, terra-forming planets, building a vast wealth, collecting rare items, or just messing around with your tractor beam, is open to the player.  And just like in the Sims, everything you need requires more money (ie: Simoleons or in this case Spore Bucks).  Advancement in the Space stage is built around achievement-type goals called “Badges”.  There are badges for just about every action you can think of, such as: travel X number of lightyears, establish Y number of colonies, spend Z amount of Spore Bucks, etc.  Each badge unlocks a new item to buy in the store and contributes to your advancement in the Space stage.  The skill tree does become a bit intricate though, and I spend a good deal of time checking back at the badge list to see what I’d need to do next to unlock my next ship upgrade.

The Web 2.0 Aspect

The viral nature of Spore’s community options is simply astounding.  Spore takes a cue from the recent games offering community sharing, but takes it to another level.  Much like RSS feeds or iTunes podcasts, you can subscribe to a player’s “Sporecast”.  This automatically fills your Spore galaxy with their creatures, vehicles and buildings in an intelligent manner.  So you may be playing in the Tribal stage and discover that your friend’s race of Family Guy-inspired Stewie creatures has taken residence in your backyard or a Starship Enterprise fleet of ships keeps antagonizing you in the Space stage.  Spore is still a single-player game, so other players can never directly control their creations and wreak havoc on your civilization.  But you can keep tabs on what your creatures are doing in other people’s games.  You can even browse and import from the “Sporepedia,” which is a central database of every single creation made by other players.  So if you think about it, the game’s art assets are practically infinite.

Bottom Line

Unlike The Sims games, Spore has an end goal to reach, so it does come to a conclusion eventually.  In the end, I would have liked to see more of the sandbox elements shine through, but it seems that Will Wright and the folks at Maxis have taken another step closer toward a more goal-oriented experience, albeit with mixed results.  I think it’s safe to say that the game experience was created with a more casual user in mind, but the object editors and sharing features more than make up for the issues in gameplay.  If you happen to have a friend with the game, check it out and see if it’s for you.  Also, be sure to download the demo of the creature creator from the Spore website.

Sleepy Gamer Says.. TRY IT