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Spore Review

5435 Views 12 Replies 9 Participants Last post by  Trent
I have to say that I have been eagerly waiting for this game for, what, 4 years now?
Well it is finally here and I have some initial impressions to share with you.

Instead of going into a detailed review of the game, I am just going to share my impressions with you.

The game is broken up in to multiple stages of evolution that play like minigames. The cell stage is cute and has some cool visual effects, but the evolution design scheme is simplistic as is the game play. It is good that the first stage only lasts 30 minutes because I was getting tired of it by then. The latter stages play like crappy RTS, but with the best design tools I have ever seen and some cute aspects. Too bad the design of the creature and buildings doesnt seem to affect anything. As long as you have the right parts, the design is irrelevant. This is the absolute opposite of what we were promised with this game.
The creature stage, tribal stage and civilization stage are simply crappy RTSs with slightly increased scale at each level.
The game play seems to be very simple and you can breeze through all these stages within a couple of hours.

That brings us to the Space Stage. At this point the game shifts from a RTS made for 5 years old to a massively enormous and complex game. That should be a good thing, but this isn't a space RTS, it was supposed to be a game about evolution. The disappointing reality is that it doesnt matter in the slightest what your creature looks like and hardly matters what path he took (aggressive, religious, economic, peacemaker) in the previous stages.
The game plays out the same no matter what but what could have been a decent space RTS game turns into a tedious and buggy system of managing resources, impossibly unhappy allies and defending the largest solar system ever represented in a game with......a......single.....fucking....spaceship.

There are literally thousands of solar systems you can travel to. Too bad there is no way to flag one to go back to. "Where was that damn planet I just spent the last 3 hours and all of my money terraforming?" No way to know, you just have to sit there any hover the mouse over each system looking for the name. All the while every 10 fucking seconds an ally or enemy is demanding something from you. You could ignore them for a while, but then they declare war on you and invade your planets. No big deal till you show up with your.....one....fucking....spaceship...only to find that they brought 5 space ships. Kiss your planet goodbye despite spending the last 10 hours terraforming (very involved) building infrastucture and mining it.
To top it off, for some inexplicable reason, your....one...fucking....spaceship...can no longer rotate the chase camera, like it could in all the other stages, so not only are you fighting multiple ships with better weapons than yours but you CANT EVEN SEE THEM!

Luckily aggressive enemies move slowly, so you have time to do something. No way to prevent losing that planet, though. I eventually just gave up on playing the most tedious space RTS ever that was supposed to be a game about evolution.

Pros:
- Best design tools ever
- unique game
- some cute moments and cool gameplay

Cons:
- simplistic gameplay in early stages
- inconsistent controls and camera (different from one stage to the next)
- little to no continuity between stages (didnt matter much what you did in previous stages, felt like 5 separate games only linked by a similar looking creature)
- creature design only mattered in initial stage
- creature design was not "evolutionary" as was promised, you could completely rebuild creature at any generation
- documentation was a joke (only needed in space stage, but it doesnt even cover all the equiment much less give you any ideas on how to manage onslaught of demanding NPCs).
- EA installs aggressive DRM that limits installs to 3 ever.
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"There are literally thousands of solar systems you can travel to. Too bad there is no way to flag one to go back to. "Where was that damn planet I just spent the last 3 hours and all of my money terraforming?" No way to know, you just have to sit there any hover the mouse over each system looking for the name. All the while every 10 [fizzle]ing seconds an ally or enemy is demanding something from you. You could ignore them for a while, but then they declare war on you and invade your planets. No big deal till you show up with your.....one....[fizzle]ing....spaceship...only to find that they brought 5 space ships. Kiss your planet goodbye despite spending the last 10 hours terraforming (very involved) building infrastucture and mining it.
To top it off, for some inexplicable reason, your....one...[fizzle]ing....spaceship...can no longer rotate the chase camera, like it could in all the other stages, so not only are you fighting multiple ships with better weapons than yours but you CANT EVEN SEE THEM!"


Sounds like the perfect recipe for futility and frustration .
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I agree...My game seems to crash my comp. randomly as well. I didn't install the EA download manager either....The shit just crashes.

Good idea, bad execution.

-Chris
The sad thing is that the demo from way back in 2006 was WAY better than the final game.
That is disappointing. I remember the reviews of this game 4 years ago, and looking forward to its release. Ive heard alot of negative reviews so far, and your not the only one who's having issues easybob.

Seems funny they go through all the work for DRM, and the only people they screw over is the legal buyers.
The game was cracked before it was even officially available, so not only do pirates not have to put up with the DRM, but they got to play it earlier too.

Apparently Will Wright decided they'd sacrifice the quality of the game in order to appeal to a broader audience and sell more copies and that's why it feels dumbed down.

Maybe EA will release a ton of expansion packs for it like they do with the sims, and if you get all of them it might approach what it looked like it was going to be. You can count on them trying to milk this thing for every last dollar.
Apparently Will Wright decided they'd sacrifice the quality of the game in order to appeal to a broader audience and sell more copies and that's why it feels dumbed down.

Maybe EA will release a ton of expansion packs for it like they do with the sims, and if you get all of them it might approach what it looked like it was going to be. You can count on them trying to milk this thing for every last dollar.
That sounds way true and disapointing.
Maybe EA will release a ton of expansion packs for it like they do with the sims, and if you get all of them it might approach what it looked like it was going to be. You can count on them trying to milk this thing for every last dollar.
i think you have hit the nail on the head

scooby your review was right on, except they have been working on spore for 10yrs (no joke) thankfully i didnt pay for it i downloaded it.

i made it to the space stage got frustrated trying to to anything but war with other planets, then got frustrated with that because on most of the planets the planes that attack you when you are invading fly off when they are low on health faster than your missiles can chase then and one they hit a certain point they just magically get full health and come back to attacking you. so then i tried using the cheats to get tons of money and refill my health whenever i needed it. that lasted about an hour before i got bored and i havent touched the game since.

my recommendation don't buy it don't even bother downloading its not worth the bandwidth
...faster than your missiles can chase...
Haha! I noticed that too! I was actually flying infront of the the baddies to hit them with missiles, or got close enough to use the laser.

That was a weird problem...It was like the missiles didn't launch from your ship, but from a little bit behind it, depending on how fast you where moving.

-Chris
I think people can begin to imagine the absolute frustration with the combat system.
I mean, you have one ship against many, the enemy ships can outrun your missiles, the autocannon doesnt seem to do anything, and you cant even rotate the camera so half the time the enemy is off screen.
I also bought this game and feel quite ripped off. I was really dissappointed by the fact that the fish stage was cut out completely. how the hell do you go from a bacteria to a land animal??? I agree that the preview from 2 years ago seemed much better and that the release version seems very dumbed down. I think the only good part of the game was the creature mode, thats the only part where the different parts of the creature actually make a difference, once you hit the tribal stage and up it makes little difference what abbilities your original creature had.
One review I read described the creature creation process nicely, he said "it is not really about evolution as much as it is 'pimp my creature'".
Portal > *.*
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