Greatdictator reviews Spore (FINALLY)
From the creative mind of the guy that made making a person eat,sleep and poop fun and loveable,namely Will Wright called Spore
The game in total is totally based on the players creativity and depending on what kind of creature you want to create it can be one of 4 things cute,scary ,awesome and….really REALLY BAD! And the story as Will Wright said it so many times goes the way the player wants them to and the story is really ones own when the player is capable of making nearly anything in the games huge variety of creators which we can definitely hope will be more off in the future.
Gameplay wise it has 5 stages the Cell stage which resembles an old school Pac man game,after you crawl out onto land thats where the Creature stage which resembles an MMO starts you will either befriend yourself with neighbouring species…or eat them soon afterwards you will start looking for new parts by either finding ones laying around ..or eat other species for their as you evolve with each new generation of your species you will be able to add more of the parts that you want and have currently found you will also be able as your brain evolves be able to recruit more members to your pack,when your brain finally pops out and you start building a small village you will be in the Tribal stage where the game takes the form of a traditional RTS depending on the way that your diet has been so far you’ll either need to collect meat,fruits,fish or all 3 so far and in the other 2 stages depending on what you chose to be in the previous stages will determine what powers or special abilities you will have in later stages such as calling a large beast of the seas to get you lots of fish or to set traps in the tribal stage or to use nukes in civilization stage,just like in the last stage you will be able to befriend other tribes or destroy them and you’ll get more tools and stuff for your tribe although i do feel that they should have made the tribal buildings also available in a creator …i also think that they should have put up wall’s …but depending on what path you choose the main hut will change , and once you either destroyed everybody or made friends with them or both you will enter the Civilization stage and conquer the WORLD…well your world at least weather it will be ruled by some of the cutest beings in the universe or some of the literally biggest D**** is your decision since the start of the game in this stage you have the most options as far as customization goes you can create depending on what path you have already chosen to go military,economic or religious land vehicle’s ,ships or planes and buildings as well too bad you cant do the same with turrets though and the gameplay is basically civilizations meets Real time strategy and after everyones either converted or conquered and you got the whole planet to yourself you can make a nice little spaceship and enter the Space stage where now you can go to various planets and you can pick shit up with your tractor beam and throw em around or you can gather information from creatures,buildings ect. ..or as the usual just blow stuff up with your standard laser or the nice array of nifty weapons and tools that you can purchase,the game’s space stage is pretty much the end phase of the game and is close to endless and you have lots more to do…although as a imperial AT-AT fan i only wish that i could have had a bit better way to conquer enemy planets,but still you can do alot of things with other planets such as terraform them to a T3 planet so that you may place more colony’s and produce more spice which is the civilization stage’s and space stage’s main resource which you can later on trade for Sporebucks although you will most probably be declared war upon as soon as you’ve colonized your first planet…no actually that will happen after you jump to a couple of stars later….some missions will definetly start to annoy you such as it always says planet attacked by unknown species means you never know if its pirates or enemy ships which can get annoying or the destroy 5 of that species or the ecosystem collapses those 2 get annoying but the missions from other planets are rewarding and have some variety and i might as well say it now and you can blow and entire planet up the weapon will cost ya around 2 million sporebucks but if you manage to find earth and then blow it up then its just as rewarding and the game has its own little achievements and most of them can be won within the games short campaign…oh and btw to conquer a planet you’ll first enter a dogfight style battle before you can commence bombing the planets colony’s.
The game is at least 60 % creating and just letting your imagination loose especially if your talented the game’s creations can look like anything but one things for sure…everything looks like its a Pixar creation,and the best thing is if you wanna see stuff made by other people VIA Sporepedia the game’s catalog of other user created creatures,buildings ,vehicles and so on and there are over 20 million creations for you too choose from. You can even subscribe to other players created content so that every time the guy you subscribed to it uploads his latest creation but lucky if you don’t want to download the stuff theres always the pre made stuff from the Spore developers.
The game has definetly one of the best technology’s so far even if not graphically the fact that you can create…say a spider with like 10 legs 4 arms and 6 eyeball’s and it will still find a way to animate all the different animations is really impressive no matter in what stage your in and its usually just fun to see your creatures make gun parades or praise thi lord later on in the civilization stage.
The game’s music is well executed…oh and did i forget to mention you can even compose your creatures own national anthem once you enter the civilization stage.
Basically the game is literally for everyone the game can take even those that don’t play that much video games and make them addicted to the game just by seeing the amount of things that one can create within its various creator’s which makes the game an excellent gateway game.
Some parts of the game are shallow without a doubt but the game has been made simplified for the casual audience which makes the game more appealing but will definetly turn most hardcore players off of the experience but after all this is a Maxis game and we can definetly expect to see future expansions that will change up the gameplay or add even more parts for us to tinker with…but just like the Sims…its easy to say and see that Spore is definetly a game of its own genre even if it had to take elements of others to create it but no matter if you like it or hate it …until you played it you’ve definetly never experienced anything like it.
Pros
-Gameplay is going to appeal to wider audience due to simplistic design
-music and graphics give the feel of pixar quality
-expansions will most probably pep things up
-and creating stuff is INCREDIBLY addictive
Cons
-its abit TOO simplistic at times
-hopefully the expansions wont have to litte material
-its gets TOO FREAKING addictive
October 15th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
looks like a really fun game