Spore: Review of a PC Game

I have been a fan of Maxis games since the original Sims first hit shelves. I have been hopelessly devoted to just about every game it has released, and its simulation games are by far my all-time favorites.

Spore hit shelves, though, a few weeks ago, and, unfortunately, I had to wait a few weeks to purchase a new gaming PC after mine literately went up in smoke. The time had finally come though. I picked myself up a Dell XPS 630 gaming PC, and Spore was one the first games I purchased for the new computer.

What Is Spore?
 
Just about the coolest game Maxis has ever delivered since the Sims!

Spore is basically a game of evolution. You start your game off as this small leech like organism where you paddle your little creature around feeding it to allow it to grow. I choose to have my organism be a plant eater. You can also choose meat eater. As time goes on and your creature evolves it becomes smarter, eventually so smart that it will be able to explore space to meet, or make war with other creatures in the universe.

The game starts off in a cell stage. Here you start off as a small organism which you will need to feed, mate, and evolve.

As I went about collecting pieces of plant food, and breaking apart small meteor rocks to find new character upgrades my little guy came across other organisms. Some I could kill, and others could kill me. Meanwhile other organisms looked just like me. By clicking on my mating call, my organism would mate with that organism, and the process of evolving my creature was under way.

Basically after the two same species of organism mates you are taken to another screen where you can upgrade your spore to something completely different. Here in the building menus you can add horns, new tails to speed your organism up, new eyes, and other upgrades for your organism.

You can also change your species body shape, and color. Basically you can change your simple organism into some sort of sick awesome organism that will get even more awesome as it evolves, and as you find new upgrade body modifications in worlds you're creature will visit.

Anyhow, after swimming around the organism pool, growing my organism, evolving it, and mating it, I see that my organism is evolved enough as to where it is ready to finally walk land.

This is basically part 2 of the game. Land stage, or creature stage, whatever you want to call it.
As a new land walker you are first taken to a screen to ultra modify your organism into the land walking creature you want it to be. If you want 3 eyes, 4 pairs of legs, wings, horns, and whatever else you want to add to your creature you can do it here. Like the cell stage, the land stage is pretty much the same deal, only a little more complicated.

You can enter the land stages as a peaceful creature trying to make friends with other creatures, or you can attack and go to war with them. No matter how you go into the land stages though it won't matter, because as you complete missions you will get paid in DNA points. The DNA points are used to buy new upgrades, or body modifications.

I found that going to war or making friends was easy no matter which path I chose. In order to become friendly with surrounding creature colony's I had to impress them.

Impressing other species was pretty easy. Basically my creature had to mimic whatever that creature did. For instance I wanted to become friends with a colony of monkey like creatures. I would stand in front of them using a social stance, and eventually that creature would strike a move for me. I had to copy that move directly after the creature shows it to me.

The moves consist of dancing, posing, singing, and charming.

This is pretty easy so long as your creature is all upgraded when you evolve it. If your creature is missing the charming ability, than you cannot impress the other species. You can simply evolve the Spore by mating with another species of your own, and adding some charm details to your creature.
Going to war with another species can sometimes prove fatal, but know that if your creature dies, you simply start back at your nest, and there is no real punishment to dying.

Going to war is probably a little easier than impressing surrounding colonies of creatures. You will want to make sure though that your creature has some nice upgraded weapons.

After making your way around the land, and either making friends or killing creatures, your Spore will eventually grow a larger brain. The creatures brain eventually grows so large that you are taken to the next stage of the game which is the Tribal Stage.

The tribal stage plays like an entire different game, and to be honest it threw me off with all new controls. The first thing that bothered me was that I didn't have full control of my creature I had evolved in the land stage. Instead I was controlling an entire tribe of my created species. Once I got the hang of the controls though, I enjoyed the tribal stage, even though it seemed to end a lot faster than I imagined it would.

Basically in the tribal stage you have to become friendly with the surrounding brown tribes, or you can go to war with them. I chose to become friendly with them not knowing if they would join my Allie in another stage. You become friendly with them by serenading them with musical instruments. You basically get the instruments by placing the tool buildings in your new little tribal colony. You can purchase them by gathering fruits for money. You are also given new instrument buildings when you become friends with another tribe, or if you kill the other tribe.

Once you have become friendly or destroyed all surrounding tribes, you are then advanced to the Civilization stage. If you have ever played the game Civilization, this is sort of what this level offers only scaled down.

In this stage you are given a vehicle that you get to construct in the build mode. Making your own vehicle is pretty fun, and similar to making your creature. The sky is the limit, so when constructing your car let your imagination run wild.

Anyhow, in the Civilization stages you basically take over the entire land. You start off by making your colony's town capital building, which is a ton of fun by itself. Once you have your building made, you can either kill each surrounding tribe by attacking, or you can buy them out. I choose to attack them, and it honestly did not take long to conquer all of the other tribes. In fact the whole war mode was pretty boring on easy mode.

Once I took over all of the tribes, the next stage is the Space Stage. This is pretty much the largest stage you will be playing, and the controls get pretty difficult to understand. In this stage you are to design your own space ship, which was fun. Building in this game is probably the funnest thing about the game.

Anyhow, in this stage you basically hover around the galaxy in your spaceship looking to take on new missions, explore other planets, build up uninhabited planets as your own, take over other planets, trade goods, and roam about the star galaxy. It's pretty easy getting lost here because the stage is so gigantic, and offers tons of things to do.

Although I am still navigating the space stage, I will say it is pretty fun, but the non stop back and forth hovering from planet to planet is a bit tedious over time. However the more missions you take on the more tools your ship will receive, and the more tools you have to use the funner the space stage gets.

Overall:
 
For me Spore is a fun game. In fact it's a nice way to kick away a few hours on a rainy day. There is tons to do, customization galore, and it's beyond cool to watch your little organism transform over time into this super intelligent space explorer.

The game though indeed has some minor issues, but really the issues I speak of are my own personal complaints.

For starters I would have loved the beginning stages to offer a bit more. For instance the organism cell stage would have been cool had it lasted a little longer than 10 minutes. The tribal stage was also too short, and offered nothing spectacular to the game. Civilization stages were decent, but it would have been cool had it been a little more challenging, and not so repetitive.

As far as feeling jipped on some of the earlier stages though, Spore is a killer game which kids and adults alike will enjoy. The controls are relatively simple, but as each stage offers something new things can be a little confusing for the first few minutes at each new stage. The space stage though confused me the most, but once again, I was able to get the gist of things pretty quickly.

All in all, I feel that if you are a fan of Maxis and creation games, or games where you feel as if you are God, than you will enjoy Spore. As far as re-play value goes though, I have to say that Spore sort of fails. I honestly cannot see myself picking Spore up again after conquering the Space Stage. Although I can start off at any stage I wish after beating the game, the receptiveness of it all would just bore me to death. I feel that once I have played this game once over, I doubt I will be in a hurry to begin a new game.

Spore grabs 7 stars out of 10 in my opinion.