Tags: Games   Rants   Reviews


In my mind, I imagined that Spore would be the ultimate game for me. A game based on evolution? Brilliant! Battles between cellular organisms? Yes! Sandbox gameplay set in an entire galaxy? Oh please! Colonization, terraforming, space ship design? Gimme!

After only about 5 days of playing, I turned the game off tonight in disgust and made a pact with myself never to play the game again. The shortcut has been removed from my desktop, the manual hidden out of sight. A game hasn't made me this frustrated and irritable since Black & White, which is my most hated game. Peter Molyneux is shit, but Will Wright is not! What happened?

Spore is broken down into 5 stages of play, so I'm going to review each phase separately. The space stage was the one I was looking for the most. I would have bought Spore if it only included the space stage. So if I seemed to have good things to say about the early stages, it hardly matters. Ok, here I go...


Cell Stage

This phase is a gorgeous re-interpretation of Pac-Man. It is elegant, fluid, and calming. I suspect that this is where the game's inspiration started and ended. "Wouldn't it be neat if you could play a multi-cellular organism and play through it's evolution?" Yes it would be neat, and it is! Huzzah! As I played this stage, I marveled at how my creature gradually grew in size and shape with each generation, and the fuzzy gigantic organisms in the depths of the primordial ooze gradually focused and joined my creature's food chain. Then a few minutes later, my creature was the gigantic organism and they were the nuggets I was snacking on, soon to be too small to even see. Checking my creature's history at the end of the stage, I saw that almost 7 billion years had passed. This stage truly captures the essence of evolution, and more importantly, it's a fun game. Still, it's Pac-Man and the novelty wears off after half an hour.

Creature Stage

Still grinning from the cell stage, I enjoyed the creature stage. I got the most enjoyment after having my creatures "mate" so that I could change my species. With each generation, I improved the look of my species so that I liked it more as I played. In a sense, my satisfaction with my species increased a bit with each generation. This stage didn't feel so much like evolution as it did intelligent design. *shudder* My choices while playing had little impact on the evolution of my species. Playing the creature stage means doing only a few things: picking up species customizations from the ground, killing other species, and making friends with other species. That's it. Killing and befriending are really the same action with different animations. As for the evolution, couldn't the developers have thought of something more creative than picking up parts to evolve your species? I don't think Darwin suggested that birds got their wings by finding them on a beach, or that reptiles scooped up their brains from a pond.

Still, I enjoyed this stage well enough. It plays like a prototype of World of Warcraft, except without any cool features. Hmm... did I really enjoy it? Maybe I was just excited to be playing Spore, with the promise of the space stage still to come. *sigh*

Tribal Stage

Having reached the tribal stage, the hours spent customizing my species were made irrelevant and my highly evolved brain began to tell me that Spore might suck. Still, the space stage will be great! Right?

In the tribal stage, my creatures were too small to make out any of the details that made my species so cool! (If I do say so myself.) It plays like a real-time strategy game, like the original Warcraft games. But I played the first Warcraft RTS, and it had a lot more going for it than Spore's tribal stage. Spore has stripped down the RTS formula to its most basic elements, so that you end up with a stage that isn't fun, isn't challenging, and abandons everything you've done in the game so far. This stage is where the train wreck that is Spore begins. Spore has officially gone off the rails here.

On the bright side, I unlocked the achievement for beating the tribal stage in less than an hour. I hated it almost immediately, so I got through it as fast as possible. It's so simple, I can't see how anyone could spend more than an hour, or why they would want to.

Civilization Stage

The civilization stage is awful, awful, awful. And I had to spend more than an hour on it. I don't even want to write about it.

What's worse is that elements of this stage carry forward into the space stage. Arranging buildings in your little cities is a chore you will need to perform repeatedly in the space stage after every attack (see later). There's nothing fun about designing and arranging the idiotic cities in Spore. Even on the highest graphic settings, they are a blurry, blobby mess. And I still can't see my wonderful species, as they're being blocked by blurry buildings! Bah! Frustration rises!

Space Stage

And here's where the train wreck appears in all its horrifying glory. I played the space stage for three evenings (about 10 hours), because I just couldn't look away. "Is it really this terrible?" Yes, I've concluded that it is. Here's are some of my problems with it:

1. Endless Attacks: My colonies are always under attack, and I have never had more than 2 colonies at a time! Every 5 minutes a popup message tells me I need to save a colony. I decided to just ignore the attacks, which turned out to be a bad strategy. There's no time to explore space between all the attacks. While I investigate a planet to see if I want to colonize it, it's a sure thing that I'll be called away to deal with yet another attack. How is that supposed to be fun?

2. I want to explore! Following on number 1, I don't know how I'm supposed to explore space if I am kept busy with unprovoked wars and pirates. Can't I just have time to explore space and colonize planets for a while?

3. My ship won't defend itself outside of planets. My allies' ships will defend me, but there's no way to use my own ship's weapons in space. Why? Will I need to buy an expansion pack for this feature? Will I care?

4. Micromanagement of colonies: Each city on each planet needs to have its buildings plopped down inside a circle with connected lines that I guess is supposed to be a mini-game... It's annoying. Whenever a colony is invaded (every 5 minutes), buildings get destroyed. But I don't know which ones, so I need to check each city and replace what I think is missing. There's no shortcut for doing this, so I need to drag and drop each building again and again and again. While I'm doing this, it's possible that another attack will start somewhere else.

5. Space is crowded. It seems that the developers assume that space is filled with intelligent life. All the systems around me were quickly colonized by alien species, so I need to travel far away to find uninhabited systems. While searching, attacks are happening back home. Are you getting the picture yet?

6. Where's the sandbox? In marketing for the game, the space stage was promoted as a huge sandbox for you to play in. But this sandbox is the kind that throws sand in your eyes and kicks you in the groin repeatedly! It hurts! The sandbox hurts! Make it stop! I don't have any freedom to do anything creative or interesting in the space stage. It hates me, and I hate it.

The space stage, more than any other part of the game, is so disappointing it's maddening. How could Maxis have made it so irritating? Did the playtesters actually enjoy it, or were they simply ignored?

I'm not sure that I can play Spore anymore. If there's a patch that somehow fixes the space stage, then I'll give it another try. Or maybe some talented modders make some changes. I want to play it because the idea of Spore is alluring. I want the game that was supposed to be Spore!

If I find out how to make the space stage fun, I'll be sure to write a post about it. If you know what I'm doing wrong, please leave a comment! I would like to give Spore a second chance and start enjoying it. But for now, I'm completely disappointed.