Spore

After ten years in development, the "ultimate evolution simulator" finally hit the shelves this Sunday. Who releases games on Sunday? I guess in a game where you play god, releasing on Sunday makes for irony. Earlier this year, we were given a taste of the goods with Spore Creature Creator, which was fun for the whole family. Now, we have the game wrapped around that tech demo. Was it worth the wait?

First off, this game has been misleadingly billed. We've been bamboozled, I tell ya! The evolution aspect of the game involves very little of the overall game play of this title. This game is about conquering the galaxy, and I'd say 75-80% of the time spent in game is in spaceflight mode. But, you do start off as a microscopic organism and end up a conqueror of the cosmos. The path from beginning to end in this game involves five separate stages of game play. Key in on the separate part, because all 5 play differently and there isn't much beyond cosmetics that carry through from one stage to the next. The game does keep track of your actions and your general approach to the game. It uses this as a model for how you start the next stage. For example, if you slaughter everything in sight, you go down a military path. If you get all Coca-Cola "teach the world to sing" Kumbaya, you’ll go down a commerce or religious path. However, it's pretty easy to switch paths midstream, and I didn't see a whole lot of consequences for past actions, so this is inconsequential overall. My first game, I went exclusively carnivore and basically slaughtered everything in sight. This made me a military force by mid game. When I got to space faring, I went totally trade route, because in space, none of those other guys know how you got there.

Stage 1: Tide Pool

You start off spending about a half hour wading in the tide pool. A comet crashes into your planet and deposits the genetic material that eventually becomes your little microorganism. This stage is essentially a mini game, not much more complicated than a game you'd find on cell phone (playing a single cell creature on a cell phone -- priceless). Here, your goal is to swim around and eat everything you can. Eating stuff makes you grow and collect body parts to upgrade your character. Upgrades happen during the mating phase. The best advice I can give is to make sure you’re an omnivore before you get out of this stage: going carnivore-only limits your options later on. This stage is very 2D, but the scenery is cool, with some fuzzy backgrounds of bigger and badder creatures on the periphery, like giant squid. At the end of this stage, you leave the tide pool, and walk on land.

Stage 2: The Creature Stage

The second stage, my personal favorite of the game, I would have guessed was the core of the game, considering how the game was promoted. The previously released Creature Creator exists entirely within this stage of the game. I must have spent about two hours here at most. This part of the game plays like a simpleton's RPG. Here, you are given a handful of quests, like make friends with another species or migrate to a new nesting ground. The majority of the game play is making contact with other animals and searching the continent for more genetic material to use as body parts. Collecting genetic material and either making nice or wiping other species off the map gives you DNA points. Get enough DNA points and you can level-up, er, evolve. It's best to explore and meet as many species as possible to get collect as many body parts as possible for the character creation page. Along the way, there were some fun stuff that showed in this stage, like proof that you're not alone in the universe, and some roaming epic monsters that should be avoided at all cost.

Like the tide pool, you evolve by mating, the natural process by which you gain access to the creature creator screens. There's a lack of continuity here, as you could completely wipe your character and start from scratch, assuming you have enough DNA points to do so. Tacking on body parts boosts your skills and stats. But, they're not additive. So, if you have 1 item that gives Level 5 Bite and one that gives Level 2 Bite, you have Level 5 Bite, not Level 7. The simplifies the character creation a bit, because you only need to use the body parts that have give the highest of each value. Eventually, you'll evolve enough to move on to the next stage. Be careful, once done here, you cannot change the appearance of your species.

Stage 3: Going Tribal

The third stage of the game is the tribal stage. Here, the game takes on a jarringly different control scheme. You no longer control your character, but control a squad of tribe mates. This part of the game reminds me of a poor man's Warcraft III. You get a few buildings that have different roles, like developing axes, spears, and fishing hooks to improve your skills. You then train your tribe members to specialize in one of these roles. Other than gathering the only real resource of this stage, food, your objective is to make contact with other tribes of other species on the continent, and you can either wipe them out or become their allies. As you make contact with other tribes, you gain technology, which allow you to add more building types to your town. The overall goal of this stage is to conquer the continent. This is easily the weakest stage of the game.

The creature creation part of the game is now gone and is replaced with city creation and character gear. The city creation allows you to choose which buildings to add to your town. Overall, there are 8 building types, but only 6 slots to put them. Talk about immensely rich strategy. Whoop-de-freaking-doo! The characteristics of the species built in the previous stage of the game don't seem to factor here, instead relying on the clothing for stats. The wardrobe editor allows you to put gear on your tribe members, and the gear boosts your stats in five areas, like gathering, combat, and health (hint: gathering is useless to a carnivore). Like the creature editor from the prior stage, these aren't additive, so you only really need like 5 pieces of gear to max your stats, but can add as many as you can afford for cosmetics.

Stage 4: Taking Over the World

Once your tribe conquers the continent, the delusions of grandeur kick in. You become the sole dominant species of the planet, but your species fragments into various factions. Based on your conduct, your tribe has an identity about how it’s going to take over the world. As I basically killed everything in sight in my first game, I built a military empire. Here, you get a full fledged, but simplistic, town, akin to something like the game Civilization with a real-time mechanic. You get a town hall, factories, housing and entertainment centers, for keeping the peeps happy. You build a fleet of vehicles to gather resources, of which there is only one, spice. Yep, spice makes the world go 'round. Your fleet also makes contact with other factions and decides whether to take a diplomatic or combative approach to ruling over them. Collect enough cities under your control and you can advance your technology, to a point where you build an air force and eventually, an "I Win" button. This stage took an hour or two to complete. The wardrobe creator is still available in this stage and even the next one, and additional creation tools are now available for buildings and vehicles. While not as robust and the creature creator, it's pretty much the same stuff, just for different, uh, you know, stuff.

Stage 5: Going Galactic

After you conquer the world, you get to start exploring the galaxy. First off, you design your spaceship, much like you built everything else. Then you start off as a lowly cadet trying to earn your pilot's wings to fly your spaceship. What's with going from leader of the tribe to leader of the world, to lowly space trucker? This final stage is the meat and potatoes (assuming you're an omnivore) of the game; it's pretty much your standard RTS/RPG style game where you explore the galaxy, meet other species, establish colonies, create trade routes, run some missions for the various factions, and upgrade your spaceship and build a fleet. The thing that stands out the most of the stage is the enormity of the space. It's freaking huge, and there's like a million planets to discover. It definitely dwarfs the rest of the game in terms of content. But, nothing that you did in the prior four stages of Spore seem to have any impact on this stage besides the cosmetics of the characters and towns. I think it's pretty telling that the bulk of the game is the least I have to talk about.

Conclusion

Overall, Spore is a collection of 5 disjointed games, that all seem to be overly derivative of existing games. The way this game is advertised, with you playing god, creating a species, is actually a small part of the game. The grooviest part of the game, and the part that is most unique to Spore, is the creation tools, especially for your species. Unfortunately, that was a $10 title six months ago. There really isn't a multiplayer component, but it does embrace Web 2.0 social networking, by allowing you to share your creations with others and vice versa. This does enhance the creation tools of Spore, which is by far its most compelling component. Unfortunately, these don't have quite enough impact on the actual game play to tie it all together into a top notch game. I had such high hopes for this title, and maybe my opinion is biased by the pedestal I built for it, but I walk away from this one with a feeling of disappointment. At least my kids dig it.