Review: Spore
Sep. 3rd, 2008 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenHey! Australia finally gets something before the rest of the world – Spore showed up here in shops a few days before the official release date!
So – Spore. One of the most hyped games of the last few years. How’s it hold up? Kind of inconsistently. The creature stage, that’s fun. The space stage is a lot of fun. The cell stage is good too. But the tribal and civilization stages are lacking a lot of what makes the rest of the game fun, and feel kinda incomplete.
See, the cell and creature phases are a lot of fun; you can create any sort of monstrosity you like, then see how it works out in the game. In cell mode, you have to decide whether you want a front mounted spike for attacking prey, or if it would be better to put it at the rear, so you’re protected from pursuing predators. In creature mode, the shape of the creature’s not as much of a factor, but you still have to decide whether you want to focus on parts that give social bonuses at the expense of defence, and if those stealthy camouflage parts are worth not getting the extra-fast set of legs. A mean animal with big teeth, sharp claws, and a pair of poison emitters isn’t going to be charming too many creatures into joining its herd, but it’ll eat species that focused on better vocal cords and elegant dancing for breakfast – quite literally!
And every so often you can tweak your creature for the next generation, removing the parts that aren’t working out and upgrading the useful bits. There’s a real sense of gradual progress, as your species develops from humble amphibian ancestors into, well, whatever you want them to be.
And then you get dumped into the tribal stage, which is totally linear. You can’t customise your primitive tools or houses, and while you can pick your alien’s outfits, the selection is extremely limited – what, exactly, is my creature with eyes on stalks and mouths on the end of his arms going to do with a mask designed for a humanoid face? Advancing to the next stage depends on eliminating all other tribes as a threat, either by allying with them or destroying them. Well, that doesn’t really give me many options, does it? A better idea, I think, would be if advancement was based on accumulating a certain amount of food – so you’d only have to eliminate tribes that posed a threat to you, and allying would be a means towards getting the other tribe to share their food stocks, not a goal in itself.
Civilization stage is worse; the moment you get to civilization stage, you immediately have to design your species’ houses, town halls, factories, and vehicles of various kinds. It kind of throws off the ‘gradual evolution of appearance’ that marks the rest of the game. Annoyingly, all the civilization era building options are purely decorative; as long as a building is set as a factory, it’s just as productive if it’s an intricately detailed piece of art or if it’s a blank cube. Now sure, I like the opportunity to be creative without worrying about efficiency, but it does bug me how there’s no effect whatsoever for all this stuff.
Also, for some reason, there’s no technological advancement in the civilization stage. You start off at an industrial level, you get aircraft once you control four cities, and that’s the only change that happens for the entire stage. The whole section of the game feels somewhat unfinished. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a detailed strategy game-within-a-game, but some token tech tree would have been nice…
And then once you’ve taken over your own planet, you get to the space age, which is the best part of the game. You’ve got your spaceship, and you can travel the galaxy meeting other aliens, colonising new worlds, upgrading your technology, and doing missions for everyone you meet. Some aliens have their own empires, some are still in the civilization or tribal phase, some worlds still don’t have sapient life. Most planets have some form of life, taken from the game’s database of creatures and ones downloaded from the Spore website – which can be fun if you’ve downloaded a bunch of interesting creatures already… one of the first missions I got given was being asked by a Pierson’s Puppeteer to eliminate some diseased Zerg Hydralisks… I also ran into some pre-spaceflight Greys, and amused myself by leaving crop circles around their cities… still not sure if that actually achieved anything, but it sure freaked them out. Particularly fun - terraforming. You have to use your technology to either build up or thin the atmosphere, then seed the planet with plants from other planets to ensure the atmosphere remains. You can also seed creatures from other planets. Then you can paint the landscape and oceans different colours... *grin*
So yes, I think it does live up to most of the hype – but there’s still a lot of rough edges. Hopefully, an expansion will come out which enhances the civilization stage and gives more tribal options.
Random notes:
- Cute touch; a spaceship flew past while I was still in the creature phase… don’t know if it was taking samples or just surveying my planet.
- Not sure what the ‘epic’ creatures are there for. They’ve all got thousands of health points, so I didn’t feel up to taking them on without knowing if there was a reward.
- The cell mode seems a little confused as to whether it’s a cell mode or fish mode. One the one hand, you’re apparently microscopic and effectively two-dimensional; on the other, you reproduce by finding a mate and laying eggs, not dividing in half. Plus, you go straight from cell to land animal.
- You acquire new body parts options by defeating animals that already have them. Your biological distinctiveness will be added to our own?
- Interestingly, it’s the creature you control, not your mate, that lays the egg that hatches into the new generation in the creature and cell levels – making Spore one of the rare games in which you have to play as a female character….
- Is there a way to rename star systems? It’s hard to keep track of all one’s colonies in the space stage.
- The game automatically saves and uploads all the creatures you make in the game – which is nice, except I don’t actually want every single generation of my species being saved on my Spore page. Would be nice if there was an option to either disable this, or at least only save the generations that advance to the next stage.
So – Spore. One of the most hyped games of the last few years. How’s it hold up? Kind of inconsistently. The creature stage, that’s fun. The space stage is a lot of fun. The cell stage is good too. But the tribal and civilization stages are lacking a lot of what makes the rest of the game fun, and feel kinda incomplete.
See, the cell and creature phases are a lot of fun; you can create any sort of monstrosity you like, then see how it works out in the game. In cell mode, you have to decide whether you want a front mounted spike for attacking prey, or if it would be better to put it at the rear, so you’re protected from pursuing predators. In creature mode, the shape of the creature’s not as much of a factor, but you still have to decide whether you want to focus on parts that give social bonuses at the expense of defence, and if those stealthy camouflage parts are worth not getting the extra-fast set of legs. A mean animal with big teeth, sharp claws, and a pair of poison emitters isn’t going to be charming too many creatures into joining its herd, but it’ll eat species that focused on better vocal cords and elegant dancing for breakfast – quite literally!
And every so often you can tweak your creature for the next generation, removing the parts that aren’t working out and upgrading the useful bits. There’s a real sense of gradual progress, as your species develops from humble amphibian ancestors into, well, whatever you want them to be.
And then you get dumped into the tribal stage, which is totally linear. You can’t customise your primitive tools or houses, and while you can pick your alien’s outfits, the selection is extremely limited – what, exactly, is my creature with eyes on stalks and mouths on the end of his arms going to do with a mask designed for a humanoid face? Advancing to the next stage depends on eliminating all other tribes as a threat, either by allying with them or destroying them. Well, that doesn’t really give me many options, does it? A better idea, I think, would be if advancement was based on accumulating a certain amount of food – so you’d only have to eliminate tribes that posed a threat to you, and allying would be a means towards getting the other tribe to share their food stocks, not a goal in itself.
Civilization stage is worse; the moment you get to civilization stage, you immediately have to design your species’ houses, town halls, factories, and vehicles of various kinds. It kind of throws off the ‘gradual evolution of appearance’ that marks the rest of the game. Annoyingly, all the civilization era building options are purely decorative; as long as a building is set as a factory, it’s just as productive if it’s an intricately detailed piece of art or if it’s a blank cube. Now sure, I like the opportunity to be creative without worrying about efficiency, but it does bug me how there’s no effect whatsoever for all this stuff.
Also, for some reason, there’s no technological advancement in the civilization stage. You start off at an industrial level, you get aircraft once you control four cities, and that’s the only change that happens for the entire stage. The whole section of the game feels somewhat unfinished. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a detailed strategy game-within-a-game, but some token tech tree would have been nice…
And then once you’ve taken over your own planet, you get to the space age, which is the best part of the game. You’ve got your spaceship, and you can travel the galaxy meeting other aliens, colonising new worlds, upgrading your technology, and doing missions for everyone you meet. Some aliens have their own empires, some are still in the civilization or tribal phase, some worlds still don’t have sapient life. Most planets have some form of life, taken from the game’s database of creatures and ones downloaded from the Spore website – which can be fun if you’ve downloaded a bunch of interesting creatures already… one of the first missions I got given was being asked by a Pierson’s Puppeteer to eliminate some diseased Zerg Hydralisks… I also ran into some pre-spaceflight Greys, and amused myself by leaving crop circles around their cities… still not sure if that actually achieved anything, but it sure freaked them out. Particularly fun - terraforming. You have to use your technology to either build up or thin the atmosphere, then seed the planet with plants from other planets to ensure the atmosphere remains. You can also seed creatures from other planets. Then you can paint the landscape and oceans different colours... *grin*
So yes, I think it does live up to most of the hype – but there’s still a lot of rough edges. Hopefully, an expansion will come out which enhances the civilization stage and gives more tribal options.
Random notes:
- Cute touch; a spaceship flew past while I was still in the creature phase… don’t know if it was taking samples or just surveying my planet.
- Not sure what the ‘epic’ creatures are there for. They’ve all got thousands of health points, so I didn’t feel up to taking them on without knowing if there was a reward.
- The cell mode seems a little confused as to whether it’s a cell mode or fish mode. One the one hand, you’re apparently microscopic and effectively two-dimensional; on the other, you reproduce by finding a mate and laying eggs, not dividing in half. Plus, you go straight from cell to land animal.
- You acquire new body parts options by defeating animals that already have them. Your biological distinctiveness will be added to our own?
- Interestingly, it’s the creature you control, not your mate, that lays the egg that hatches into the new generation in the creature and cell levels – making Spore one of the rare games in which you have to play as a female character….
- Is there a way to rename star systems? It’s hard to keep track of all one’s colonies in the space stage.
- The game automatically saves and uploads all the creatures you make in the game – which is nice, except I don’t actually want every single generation of my species being saved on my Spore page. Would be nice if there was an option to either disable this, or at least only save the generations that advance to the next stage.
- A fun challenge; try playing Creature mode with a blind species. You can still see a limited degree in front of you, and everything’s black and white. Shame the various antenna and nose items don’t give bonuses to the ‘vision’ of blind species…
- Why is there no plant editor? They've clearly all been created with the same sort of tools that the creatures, buildings and vehicles are designed in... Plus they've all got Sporeopedia entries just like the designable stuff. (EDIT: Interestingly, there is an empty 'Plants' folder in the 'My Spore Creations' folder - removed at the last minute, or still being worked on and going to be patched in soon?)
- I got the 'Galactic' edition on the grounds that, hey, it's only $10 more. I do kinda question the logic of including a special art book for a game build around user-designed content. Amusingly, the designer's prototype spaceships include what are obviously only a slightly modified X-Wing, Y-Wing and TIE Interceptor...
no subject
on 2008-09-04 01:05 am (UTC)This is the concept behind Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood trilogy. The Oankali are sure it's for humanity's own good, too.
no subject
on 2008-09-04 07:56 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-09-04 07:11 pm (UTC)At least the Oankali have the good sense to keep backups of earlier versions of the species. You never know when you might need to revert to an earlier model.