Spore: Feat or Flop?
Spore seemed really interesting to me about six months ago. As news spilled out about it I got really excited, it seemed like a really revolutionary concept and my mind was filled with little images of creating a civilization modeled after random internet creations and my own flavor of omnipotence.
As the game came to fruit, though, I lost quite a bit of interest. Now that it’s released, I’ve heard many mixed reviews from both professional reviewers and casual gamers. So I want the opinion of the people who matter: What do YOU think of Spore?
Tags: spore
Sigh. I was REALLY excited about this game. Bought it on the day it released. I played for like 12 hours that day. As much as I don’t want to say this, it really didn’t meet my expectations. The different stages are cool and give you plenty of chances to tweak your species and create things to use in your game, but it just seemed like it was all too regimented. There isn’t as much freedom in the gameplay as I was led to believe; you’re held down to a few choices that determine your ‘attitude’ during the stages. Creature stage probably is the best example of this: go the social route by mimicking other packs’ four social actions (dancing, singing, etc), or attack with your four attacking options. After repeating this ad infinitum to collect enough DNA to tweak your creature how you like, it gets tedious. Space stage, while massive and seemingly endless, murmurs of the same repetitiveness. Once you have developed your spaceship and abilities enough, all of the missions and events start to become tedious. Really the only thing driving me to continue playing is further conquest of the galaxy via the same methods I’ve been using for a few hours now.
Debate rages among Spore fans as to what happened to some of the original features shown in some early gameplay footage, like a more realistic creature stage and more advanced creation editors. I think the game was toned down, partially for a friendlier rating and to appeal to the casual gamer. There are definitely parts of the game that reek of The Sims, another one of Will Wright’s creations and another game marketed to the casual gamer. However, this does mean more users and thus more creations to explore. I’m not sure how much of a difference this means, since there are already some 16 million creations online, but it sounds good.
I can’t deny the fact that the idea of ‘Massively Singleplayer’ and the ‘Sporepedia,’ your own personal database of other people’s creations that appear in your game, is pretty awesome. It’s great seeing so much originality and creativity in the game; it really drives the game’s ability to be so massive and oftentimes, so random. However, this alone will not keep me playing the game. Eventual galaxy conquest will, at least for a while, but at a pace that is diminished from what I once thought.
I will not go as in depth into Spore as Lee did, but I did enjoy it for the most part. To be honest, I never planned on purchasing Spore until about 2 days before it was released. I picked it up early on release day and played 6 hours straight. I opted for the Hard Difficulty setting (not that Hard), and it still wasn’t that bad. At the moment, I am still about 1/5 through the Space Stage with no motivation to play at the moment. Flop? Not necessarily. Met Expectations? Maybe.