Spore Review

"Ready to take your own species on an epic journey of evolution from cellular creature to galactic god? The galaxy is yours. Let's get started."

If you know of the video game phenomenon, 'The Sims', you may or may not know that their creators were Maxis. They haven't really had much success next to their name apart from 'SimCity' or the ever popular 'The Sims' series, so they thought they could astound the globe with a brand new and original title in the form of Spore.

Spore focuses on the well known theory of evolution. Maxis then stick various objects to it to create their very own theory. You start off by choosing a planet out of seven, and plummeting onto it, into the sea, from a meteor in the form of a single celled organism. You choose whether you start as a carnivore or a herbivore and this is where your five part story begins.

As you start the so named "Cell stage", your small oddly shaped looking cell swims around looking for food in the form of your specific type. With a herbivore, you swim around looking for algae and with a carnivore, you swim around looking for tiny creatures and pieces of meat. As you continue eating these, you begin to grow. This is one of my favourite parts of the cell stage. You noticeably see all the bigger organisms around you shrink as you grow in size. As you do so, the things that were once trying to kill you, are now able to be eaten in one gulp.

As well as swimming around and eating, you collect parts for your creature. To add these parts, you mate with others in your species and create a new cell. Usually in games where you focus on a single character, you stay with that character for the length of the game. Not in this case. In Spore, you are encouraged to continue mating and evolving. Each time you mate, you can edit your newly created cell in any way, and add the parts you collected during the game. You can turn it from a carnivore to herbivore, you can make it have new limbs or parts like defensive spikes and you can make it have 10 eyes. This however, is just the start of the creature creator.

There were a few problems I had with the cell stage though. The camera on the stage isn't too good. You are looking at your cell from above and as you are moving in each direction, the camera can be very slow to catch up with you. There is no limit to how far you go left, right, up or down, but the camera can sometimes cut part of you off the screen as it is very unresponsive. The game looks good on the cell stage, but how it is played, could be more suited as a beefed up flash game.

Once you have gained enough DNA (the currency for most of the game), you swim to the surface of the sea and evolve into a land creature. The editor once again appears and you are treated to even more things to put onto your creature. This is where the editor really shows you what it can do. You can now change where you put your head, legs, how long your body is, what shape it is and how fat each and every single part of you is. At this point I was pretty impressed at how well you can change parts around the body and at the large variations of each created creature. I was to be even more impressed later on.

Once you have finished editing your creature, you move onto the next stage: The fittingly named "Creature Stage".

Just before the start of the stage, you are shown the timeline of your cell stage. This is a really cool part of the game as it shows you how many times you died, how and when you evolved and what you did during the prior stage. The timeline takes all of your actions together and decides whether what you did in the water makes you a Carnivore, a Herbivore or an Omnivore on land. If your actions were more vicious, then you would be a carnivore, if your actions were balanced, you would be an omnivore.

As you have grown legs, you begin at your nest. The game lets you familiarise yourself with the control system and tips in the top left of the screen help you with what you need to do. It does indeed take a lot of time to work out what you need to do on this stage, but once you get the hang of it, it is quite good to play. Your main goal is again to collect as much DNA as possible to help you evolve. You can do so by either killing or making friends with other species. Killing them gives you more DNA, but befriending them adds them as an ally to help you in fights. A balance of both is probably best.

As in the cell stage, you collect new parts so when it comes to the point where you want to evolve because of sheer boredom of your present creation, you can attach them as you wish. Each part you attach, gives your creation a boost in something. It doesn't matter where you put each part as its purpose is still the same. For example, you could put a large spike on its behind and it would still have a good attack.

The Creature Stage is where things start to get very familiar. If I didn't know any better, the Creature Stage is a dumbed down version of World of Warcraft. You have specific abilities such as Biting, Charging, and Poisoning which can be used when in fight scenes by pressing numbers on your keyboard just like WoW. They also take time to recharge, just like WoW. They creature stage is also a free roaming one, just like WoW. It's identical.

Once you have gained enough DNA once again, you are able to progress to the next stage of evolution: The "Tribal Stage".

Your creatures now have a more developed brain. They are able to understand how to use hand tools and are able to make a tribe. This is where I was simply gob-smacked by the sheer unrivalled editing within Spore. This is the last time that you are able to edit your creatures, and it's the most extensive. You can now put arms on your creatures so they are able to use tools. They can have as many legs or eyes as you want, their body can be altered in an unlimited amount of ways, no matter how many sets of anything you put on your creature, it will still be able to walk, move, and interact with its surroundings. I have seen many creations online that take full advantage of the editor and make things such as Pokémon, cartoon characters and other various look-a-likes. The editor is something that rips up anything else that has come before.

Your main goal in the Tribal Stage is to gather food, which is used as currency rather than DNA and build up your tribe. You meet other Tribes along your way and you can again choose to either befriend them, or attack and defeat them. To make them your ally, you bring them gifts, sing them songs and generally are nice to them. To kill them, well, it's self explanatory.

How the stage is played, is once again a carbon copy of another type of game. This time, we see the Real Time Strategy Genre creeping in. To boost your creatures with weapons, you need to build new huts (buildings). The game is played with the same camera angle (overhead). You can produce more creatures (men) to help fight and collect food (resources) or to try and defeat other Tribes (bases). All this sound familiar? Well it is, very much so. The only thing that is different is that in Spore, the mini-map is a load of rubbish.

Once you have made allies or defeated all of them, then you can move on to the next and penultimate stage of evolution. The Civilisation Stage takes the theme RTS, copies it identically and then adds a few new parts to it. I could leave it at that, but I won't, as that would be bad reviewing.

OK, in the Civilisation Stage, you build a base, choose a strategy (Economy, Religious, Military) and kill everyone else using various weapons, tactics and (dare I say it) vehicles. Yes I am still talking about a so called original game. The only thing that really sets it apart from it being a copy is that you can make allies during the game. If you tell them that they are nice people, then they like you. If you tell them that you think they are 'Lower beings' then they don't like you. No I'm not being sarcastic. Although you can make allies, you have to in the end kill them to progress. This is stupid as a lot of the time you have to give them money for them to be your allies.

After you have defeated all of your friends, you can progress to the final stage of evolution: The "Space Stage".

Other than the Cell Stage, this Stage is not (that I know of) a copy of anything else. It is good stage and is an enjoyable stage to play, although some parts are a bit confusing at times. Maybe I just get confused easily, or Maxis haven't explained some of the game stages properly. Both instances are likely, but I would think more of the latter.

You begin by creating your very own spaceship. Again there is a large amount of variables you can choose from, but many of them are the same ones you use to create cars, boats, and aircraft in the civilisation stage. Once you have completed your spaceship design, you can test fly it to get you used to the controls. The flying is bad and the camera isn't inside the cockpit but works as an overhead camera. You have to use either the right mouse button or arrow keys to turn, and move. And the scroll wheel on the mouse, to move higher and lower in the air. It's very tricky indeed.

Once you finish test failing, I mean flying, you are asked to complete missions. These can be going to other planets and studying them or abducting creatures and testing them to get info on them. The travelling to other planets is brilliant, there are hundreds of different stars, planets and galaxies to go on, but the abducting can be hilariously rubbish as picking up creatures can become tricky when you end up with them flying half way across the map.

Spore is a game that doesn't have a genre. It mixes numerous different game types into one single game; and I have to admit this does acts as a double edged sword. It's an original concept that copies others. The idea of the evolution system is a great one, but the way it is played is that of several different games. The game's main superiority is that of its creature creator, the vast amounts of editing that can be achieved in it is amazing. People's imaginations can come to life with it, but without the original game play to go with the original idea, it could be seen as something that is an incomplete package.