Spore Review

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.