Considering the hype and how much Electronic Arts has banking on it, Spore is getting hammered in some reviews to the point where MTV did a story on Will Wright’s reaction to the negative reviews.
Having played it for about 10 hours on Sunday, I can understand some of the negative reviews and Wright’s reaction to them. More than anything Spore reminds me of another game I play all the time — the 2005 update of Sid Meier’s Pirates. Like Pirates, Spore is essentially a bunch of mini-games thrown together in an attempt to make them one coherent whole. Pirates pulls that off, IMO. With Spore, however, sometimes it works, but mostly its boring and unchallenging.
You start out with the Cell level which is basically Pac-Man on steroids. This is actually fairly fun but in a casual games kind of way. My six year old son, for example, had no problem beating the Cell level several times and he still doesn’t quite get the mouse click targeting scheme the game uses.
Once you’ve built up your cellular creature enough, its on to the Creature stage. This is an simplified 3rd person action RPG. That means running around the world and either befriending or killing other creatures. Again, it was fairly entertaining but not much of a challenge.
After disposing of or befriending enough fellow creatures, its on to the Tribal stage which was a pain in the ass. Again, this was easy but it is essentially the worst RTS you’ll ever play. Halfway through this stage, I had to just stop and let my kids play because it was so maddeningly annoying.
Once I beat that, though, it was on to the Civilization stage. Again, this a very basic Civ-style game with just a handful of military units and a 6 or 7 basic structures you can put in your cities. Somewhat enjoyable, but trivially easy to beat.
Which pretty much sums up the entire game before the Space Stage. Anyone looking for any sort of challenging gameplay will be sorely disappointed. In fact, other than to earn the various achievements for various accomplishments at those levels, I’m not sure why anyone would ever go back and play them again. Getting to the Space Stage is a lot like grinding your way to level 70 in World of Warcraft — its a necessary evil, not something you look forward to going back and doing over and over again for the sheer joy of it.
The Space Stage is a mashup of games like Star Control and Elite. Run around the galaxy, take on missions, fight off pirates, establish trade routes with other species, terraform and expand your empire.
Along the way there are all of these wonderful creation tools built in the game that you could spend days tinkering with, from the creature creator to similar tools that let you design buildings, vehicles, and military units all with the same sort of control the creature creator gives you. Hell, there’s even a built-in musical creation tool so you can create a national anthem at the civilization stage if you’re so inspired. Ultimately, though, this is all very pretty window dressing that has zero impact on the gameplay itself.
Personally, I like these kinds of games, but I think the New York Times was on the money with its summation of Spore,
Beginning with all manner of outlandish creatures — want to make a seven-legged purple cephalopod that looks like it just crawled out of somewhere between the River Styx and your brother-in-law’s basement? — and proceeding through various buildings and vehicles, Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.
But it’s not a great game, and that is something quite different.
