Spore

Whether you’re a creationist or a scientist, this game lets you take a small organism, and watch it grow through infancy until you are the supreme ruler of the world. With simple controls and bright colours this game was marketed to the younger generation but, hey, I still managed to have some fun.

Game: Spore
Platform: PC
Played for: 12 hours

You start the game from a bird’s eye view, looking down into the micro world before you. This is the starting point for your evolutionary adventure. Looking down on your creature you can't help but pity how small and insignificant it is, and as one of the smallest creatures in the pool, you better start getting bigger. Straight from the off you are making choices about your creature, such as the simplest of whether it will be a carnivore or herbivore; this is done in the ‘creation mode’. After swimming around for a bit your creature will feel the ‘call of the wild’ and need to mate, nothing happens but a short dance and then you get to play about with your creation.

The editing is very easy to get to terms with, you start with a spine, whether you make it into a small blob or a winding snake is up to you, just like everything else. In this first stage there isn’t a massive amount of parts to attach to your creature but it is in the next stage of the game where this starts to be a bit more fun.

Round 2, your creature is now out of the water and exploring the land, although, if you forgot to give it eyes you could have a problem. This is pretty much the same as the first level but with the third dimension, and you're on land. All you have to do is explore, follow the prompts as and when they come up and migrate. These last 2 are easy enough as the prompts are either 'find X amount of new body parts', which are scattered around the world, or 'make friends with / destroy 5 other races'. This stage is mainly for the creature creation because after this level, you only get more distant from your creature.

The creation / editor screen is split up into categories; head, arms, legs, hands, feet and misc. In each section you will have parts that give different stats (depending on which path you’ve gone down) you may want a vicious mouth full of sharp teeth, or a sucker that makes sweet, sweet music to other animals, as many sets of wings as you want, the only limitation is the set pieces (which is expanding via downloads and expansions) and the complexity gauge, although for you to fill this up means you should have a pretty decent creature.

After this you get, guess what…… more designing!!!! The third stage is based on your creatures tribe, once you get to this stage there is no more modifying what your creature looks like. You can however now add clothes and as you join forces or destroy utterly the other tribes and families around the relatively small island you get more items and closer to the next stage, which is….

…yes, more designing. If you have a creative imagination and enjoy spending hours designing what your creature looks like, dresses like, the house it lives in, the town hall, the land vehicle, the boat, and the plane….you can see where this is going. As always the choice is up to you as to how far into the design process you go, you can leave it at a grey cube with a door, or you can garland the terraces with beautiful paint jobs and twisting spires.

After this it’s world domination, which is basic to say the least. It seems the game peaks with designing the creatures on the second level, and after you start to loose the connection with your creature as the camera quickly moves to encompass the entire world and it becomes a simple RTS, with only 2 options of destroy or befriend, this stage quickly looses any strain of originality as it uses the same screen for all design.

There is also yet another stage after this to bring the total too 5, but this is not really worth explaining as the main points are designing a space ship, flying round space picking up other species and dropping them onto your planet. This wouldn’t make me scream in frustration other than if you are connected to the internet, you have an entire compendium of all monsters created by any user, also giving you the ability to 'copy' the creature and import the design to your home world.

So, at the end of the week, I’m still finding the odd fun thing to do, such as making a very phallic orientated monster run around the map attacking everything that moves, seeing how many eyes I can fit onto a waddling blob and generally trying different combinations, but other than that, there isn’t a lot of fun to be found with this game. The designing of the creatures, buildings and vehicles would be great if it wasn’t the only attraction this game put on show.

Final Thoughts: With my total play time into the double figures, I really don’t think this game has much more to offer, if you like designing, this game could be perfect for all the little modifications you can do, other than that and your left with a small dent in your wallet and a possible 6/7 hours that could have been put to completing Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on realistic…..I don’t mean to be horrible, but for all the hype that was made around this, it offers very little apart from evolution, and basic at that.

Gamertag: Marcel the Face