Spore: A Review
Sep. 9th, 2008 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hkellickSpore is EA's new Soup-Du-Jour, an original game with quite a bit of gameplay. The basic premise of the game is the journey from microbe to master of the universe, evolving through different stages in your life/your civilization's life. There are five "stages" (there possibly could be more, which might make for an interesting expansion pack. I would not be the LEAST BIT SURPRISED if this gets expanded the way EA expands most of their simulation games.)
The INTERESTING part about Spore, though, unlike Sims or Simcity is that the game itself allows for a huge amount of creativity. You could, in SimCity or Sims, download buildings or sims or objects that you could import into the game, but it all happened outside of gameplay. In Spore, you design your creature (and can keep evolving him as you like), your creature's outfits, buildings (City Hall, House, Factory and Entertainment Complex), and Vehicles (Land Vehicle, Water Vehicle and Air Vehicle). And you can watch that construction of yours take a life of it's own. This is especially apparent with creatures. You can design creatures with four legs, six legs, three legs, twenty-seven legs, and the game itself figures out how that creature moves.
I'd say, in reality, that there's alot of SCOPE to this game, but the game lacks depth in places (sadly, too many, I feel.) which is sad. Hopefully expansion packs ARE added to at least add some depth to some of the parts. I'll explain as I explain each stage.
Cell Stage
This is a pretty simple stage. You start off as a microbe, and as you eat, you grow in size. The basic premise of the stage is pretty simple food web stuff. Eat and avoid being eaten. You start off with a handful of body parts. You can start off as an herbivore or omnivore. You can add eyes and cilia to move. Create your character and off you go. Then.. eat whatever it is you eat, and try to avoid being eaten. As you consume food, your complexity score goes up and you find yourself growing in size. Along the way, you can grab other body parts too. Sometimes from freshly killed creatures, sometimes from bits of asteroid. There are six parts as a whole that you can grab, including posion sacks and electric sacks.
Finally, you eat enough food and get big enough that.. land looks interesting. So you grow a pair of legs and are off, into...
Creature Stage
So, you're on land. And, wow, you're not the only creature there. Lots of other creatures there already. Some of them are more friendly than others. The eat or be eaten theme continues, but with a new twist. You can befriend the other creatures, through a socialization mini-game (you have four socialization skills. You try to socialize with a creature and they do, at random, one of those skills. If you're as good, if not better, than the creatures at these skills, you can win them over. If not.. they go back to ignoring you.), or you can kill off the other creatures (truth be told, you may need to do some of that if you're a carnivore ANYWAYS.). Kill off enough creatures, and you can wipe them off the planet.
One of the things I dislike, though, is that... at this stage, you're on a single continent with a bunch of creatures, but when you move on.. these creatures you've befriended or made enemies with simply disappear. I'd like it if your actions had more consequences than they do. If I'd befriended the Crosinites, and they form a tribe, let me start by being friendly with them. At least at the start. Or that they're easier to socialize and bring home to make eggs for you. If you end up aggressive with them, though..
.. but that doesn't happen. :/
Anyways... so.. you can be friends with other creatures, which earns you points, or you can kill them off, which also earns you points. As you hit a certain amount of points, your brain increases in size. Not that this helps you learn how to really use tools or anything. It's just a marker.
One of the things THIS stage has, that the cell stage has, but the next two don't... is.. a sort of scavenger hunt thing. Buried around the continent are body parts. Over 200 of them. Unbury them to find new mouths, new eyes, new ears, new hand, new feet. Some of these body parts come with bonuses. Some are better at socialization. Some are better as weapons. The more you find, and the higher powered, the more likely you'll be able to befriend or destroy everyone else. The Creature Stage is really THE place you'll be able to design your creature as I point out above, in game (unless you start at a higher stage. As you play stages, you unlock them so you could, at this point, start a new world at the Creature Stage. Or later, design a creature in the creature creator and start at Tribe stage.) With those body parts you find, and the DNA points you earn, you can create a twenty-seven legged horse with red-dotted orange skin. If that's what you want. Past this stage, you're stuck with your creature's looks. That's reason enough to keep battling and wandering around the continent, even when you get enough points to grow up. Unless you LIKE the look of your creature. Which you might.
So, anyways, at some points, you've befriended or destroyed enough tools that your brain gets big. Pretty big. Big enough to move forward and start a primitive tribe. And on you move to..
Tribe Stage
This stage is almost entirely lacking in depth. It's a cute idea that you'd have some stage in between city and creature, but.. this stage doesn't really satisfy. You have just created your own tribe. You now have the intelligence to move forward as a species. Sort of. Time to take over as a dominant culture on your continent.
As I said earlier, all those creatures you befriend? All those creatures you attacked? They're gone. You're somehow on a brand new planet (seemingly) with all new tribes.
You have some pretty limtied choices. You can forage for food (fruit if you're an omnivore or herbivore), fish if you're an omnivore, you can kill some less advanced creatures (there's nests around.) Or you can bring one of these beasties home to your tribe and let them make eggs for you
That's it.
No wood cutting, no stone breaking. Nothing. The only way to get technology is to make friends with other villages who have what you want or destroy them.
Having played a lot of civilization-based games... this stage just felt.. off. I guess I felt it should have been done.. at least closer to all the other civ games. Research things, not just get them from other tribes, and need the materials to make things.
In this game, you can either make friends (you can give other tribes a gift, and then you have to befriend them with a music mini-game), or you make war. Or some mixture, of course. At some point, you win.. and you become dominant on your continent, and take over the world.. just in time to have a falling out with others of your species.
Civilization Stage
They should call this stage the making war stage, because for most of you, that'll be your choice. You have to take over the entire world and unify it under your leadership. There are ten cities on the world, and you need to make them yours via military conquest, religious conquest or just outright buying them. What strategy YOU use depends on how you've played in the past. I played as friendly and harmless and somehow ended up religious. If I played aggressive and nasty, I'd have played military. Economic are for those people who played both ways in the tribe stage.
All I'm going to say about this stage is.. meh. It felt clunky and not very well thought out. I'm not saying the game had to match Civ or anything, but I guess I feel that if you're going to do it, bother to do it right.
There IS a resource to collect here, at least.. spice mines. He who controls the Spice controls the universethe world. If you have a factory, and people to work in that factory, you get money processing that spice. Enough to fund the army you'll need (or, I guess, to buy out other cities.)
There's a HINT of City Simulation here, but again, it's very shallow. You need a factory to make money, and houses near the factory help make money, but they also make people unhappy, so you need entertainment to keep people happy, but not near the factory or that makes people even MORE unhappy. Oh, and turrettes around the city to protect you from attack. Unhappy cities are more easily won over by religious messages. (Which is why Religious players have special abilities to make entertainment facilities (and turettes) stop working, so you can convert them. Useful ability I used in my last game.
At this stage, you'll do alot of creation. You have to personally create every building in your city.. houses, factories, city hall, entertainment, and every vehicle you use: land vehicles, water vehicles and, eventually, when you get four cities under your control, air vehicles. The tools are kinda neat, and you can really tweak around to make your vehicles stronger (at the expense of speed and power), more powerful (at the expense of speed and HP) or faster (again, at expense)
At some point, you can get at least six cities under your control and if you're like me and sick of arguing, there's another ability to bring the rest of your planet under your control and move forward.. on to SPACE! :D
Space Stage
If the last two stages were lacking in depth, this stage totally makes up for it. So, you're in space. What do you do NOW? Do you trade? Do you wage war? Do you colonize? Do you just poke around making planets pretty? Do you want to build a trade network (Spice is back. And other planets have different spice than yours does. Worth trading for? Absolutely!) or a federation of friends? Do you want to terraform? This stage is VERY open-ended. You can do all that and more. And the more you do of the things you want to do, the more tools you'll unlock to help you. IF you're a trader, you can unlock a bigger cargo bay. If you're a terraformers, you unlock more terraform tools, etc.
How you play is entirely up to you.
Man, if they'd done that with the civ stage, and let you have alot more choices to truly rule the planet (a loose trade federation,a group of allies, military conquest, etc.), that would have been sweet. But in any case...
The only constant enemy you'll have to deal with are the Grox... an, as yet, unknown (to me so far. I hear you can get to meet and ally with the Grox if you want, but I'm not there yet.). Oh, and Space Pirates. They tend to be a real hassle, and like to go after your colonies, if they aren't protected well. And, of course, you're the only one who can protect those colonies. Meet other aliens, make friendly with them (it helps to be willing to pick up missions from them. Though some aliens are more pre-disposed towards being friendly with you than others.). Trade with them.
And explore! Explore the ENTIRE universe. Look for rare items scattered around planets all around the universe, as well as alot of planet-shaping and planet-coloring tools.
In Review
Cell Stage - Decent. No complaints.
Creature Stage - Decent. Like the scavenger hunt aspect of the game. Like the creature creativity.
Tribe Stage - Meh
Civ Stage - Meh. Make Civ Stage more open-ended. Let me unify my planet the way my species would want to do that. And if you're going to give us city creativity, make this SimCity fan happy and give us more options! (They could do a city-based expansion set, such that there'd be benefits to more complex cities, such that.. being peaceful doesn't automatically mean you're gonna die.)
Space Stage - Awesome Awesome Awesome. :D
The INTERESTING part about Spore, though, unlike Sims or Simcity is that the game itself allows for a huge amount of creativity. You could, in SimCity or Sims, download buildings or sims or objects that you could import into the game, but it all happened outside of gameplay. In Spore, you design your creature (and can keep evolving him as you like), your creature's outfits, buildings (City Hall, House, Factory and Entertainment Complex), and Vehicles (Land Vehicle, Water Vehicle and Air Vehicle). And you can watch that construction of yours take a life of it's own. This is especially apparent with creatures. You can design creatures with four legs, six legs, three legs, twenty-seven legs, and the game itself figures out how that creature moves.
I'd say, in reality, that there's alot of SCOPE to this game, but the game lacks depth in places (sadly, too many, I feel.) which is sad. Hopefully expansion packs ARE added to at least add some depth to some of the parts. I'll explain as I explain each stage.
Cell Stage
This is a pretty simple stage. You start off as a microbe, and as you eat, you grow in size. The basic premise of the stage is pretty simple food web stuff. Eat and avoid being eaten. You start off with a handful of body parts. You can start off as an herbivore or omnivore. You can add eyes and cilia to move. Create your character and off you go. Then.. eat whatever it is you eat, and try to avoid being eaten. As you consume food, your complexity score goes up and you find yourself growing in size. Along the way, you can grab other body parts too. Sometimes from freshly killed creatures, sometimes from bits of asteroid. There are six parts as a whole that you can grab, including posion sacks and electric sacks.
Finally, you eat enough food and get big enough that.. land looks interesting. So you grow a pair of legs and are off, into...
Creature Stage
So, you're on land. And, wow, you're not the only creature there. Lots of other creatures there already. Some of them are more friendly than others. The eat or be eaten theme continues, but with a new twist. You can befriend the other creatures, through a socialization mini-game (you have four socialization skills. You try to socialize with a creature and they do, at random, one of those skills. If you're as good, if not better, than the creatures at these skills, you can win them over. If not.. they go back to ignoring you.), or you can kill off the other creatures (truth be told, you may need to do some of that if you're a carnivore ANYWAYS.). Kill off enough creatures, and you can wipe them off the planet.
One of the things I dislike, though, is that... at this stage, you're on a single continent with a bunch of creatures, but when you move on.. these creatures you've befriended or made enemies with simply disappear. I'd like it if your actions had more consequences than they do. If I'd befriended the Crosinites, and they form a tribe, let me start by being friendly with them. At least at the start. Or that they're easier to socialize and bring home to make eggs for you. If you end up aggressive with them, though..
.. but that doesn't happen. :/
Anyways... so.. you can be friends with other creatures, which earns you points, or you can kill them off, which also earns you points. As you hit a certain amount of points, your brain increases in size. Not that this helps you learn how to really use tools or anything. It's just a marker.
One of the things THIS stage has, that the cell stage has, but the next two don't... is.. a sort of scavenger hunt thing. Buried around the continent are body parts. Over 200 of them. Unbury them to find new mouths, new eyes, new ears, new hand, new feet. Some of these body parts come with bonuses. Some are better at socialization. Some are better as weapons. The more you find, and the higher powered, the more likely you'll be able to befriend or destroy everyone else. The Creature Stage is really THE place you'll be able to design your creature as I point out above, in game (unless you start at a higher stage. As you play stages, you unlock them so you could, at this point, start a new world at the Creature Stage. Or later, design a creature in the creature creator and start at Tribe stage.) With those body parts you find, and the DNA points you earn, you can create a twenty-seven legged horse with red-dotted orange skin. If that's what you want. Past this stage, you're stuck with your creature's looks. That's reason enough to keep battling and wandering around the continent, even when you get enough points to grow up. Unless you LIKE the look of your creature. Which you might.
So, anyways, at some points, you've befriended or destroyed enough tools that your brain gets big. Pretty big. Big enough to move forward and start a primitive tribe. And on you move to..
Tribe Stage
This stage is almost entirely lacking in depth. It's a cute idea that you'd have some stage in between city and creature, but.. this stage doesn't really satisfy. You have just created your own tribe. You now have the intelligence to move forward as a species. Sort of. Time to take over as a dominant culture on your continent.
As I said earlier, all those creatures you befriend? All those creatures you attacked? They're gone. You're somehow on a brand new planet (seemingly) with all new tribes.
You have some pretty limtied choices. You can forage for food (fruit if you're an omnivore or herbivore), fish if you're an omnivore, you can kill some less advanced creatures (there's nests around.) Or you can bring one of these beasties home to your tribe and let them make eggs for you
That's it.
No wood cutting, no stone breaking. Nothing. The only way to get technology is to make friends with other villages who have what you want or destroy them.
Having played a lot of civilization-based games... this stage just felt.. off. I guess I felt it should have been done.. at least closer to all the other civ games. Research things, not just get them from other tribes, and need the materials to make things.
In this game, you can either make friends (you can give other tribes a gift, and then you have to befriend them with a music mini-game), or you make war. Or some mixture, of course. At some point, you win.. and you become dominant on your continent, and take over the world.. just in time to have a falling out with others of your species.
Civilization Stage
They should call this stage the making war stage, because for most of you, that'll be your choice. You have to take over the entire world and unify it under your leadership. There are ten cities on the world, and you need to make them yours via military conquest, religious conquest or just outright buying them. What strategy YOU use depends on how you've played in the past. I played as friendly and harmless and somehow ended up religious. If I played aggressive and nasty, I'd have played military. Economic are for those people who played both ways in the tribe stage.
All I'm going to say about this stage is.. meh. It felt clunky and not very well thought out. I'm not saying the game had to match Civ or anything, but I guess I feel that if you're going to do it, bother to do it right.
There IS a resource to collect here, at least.. spice mines. He who controls the Spice controls the universethe world. If you have a factory, and people to work in that factory, you get money processing that spice. Enough to fund the army you'll need (or, I guess, to buy out other cities.)
There's a HINT of City Simulation here, but again, it's very shallow. You need a factory to make money, and houses near the factory help make money, but they also make people unhappy, so you need entertainment to keep people happy, but not near the factory or that makes people even MORE unhappy. Oh, and turrettes around the city to protect you from attack. Unhappy cities are more easily won over by religious messages. (Which is why Religious players have special abilities to make entertainment facilities (and turettes) stop working, so you can convert them. Useful ability I used in my last game.
At this stage, you'll do alot of creation. You have to personally create every building in your city.. houses, factories, city hall, entertainment, and every vehicle you use: land vehicles, water vehicles and, eventually, when you get four cities under your control, air vehicles. The tools are kinda neat, and you can really tweak around to make your vehicles stronger (at the expense of speed and power), more powerful (at the expense of speed and HP) or faster (again, at expense)
At some point, you can get at least six cities under your control and if you're like me and sick of arguing, there's another ability to bring the rest of your planet under your control and move forward.. on to SPACE! :D
Space Stage
If the last two stages were lacking in depth, this stage totally makes up for it. So, you're in space. What do you do NOW? Do you trade? Do you wage war? Do you colonize? Do you just poke around making planets pretty? Do you want to build a trade network (Spice is back. And other planets have different spice than yours does. Worth trading for? Absolutely!) or a federation of friends? Do you want to terraform? This stage is VERY open-ended. You can do all that and more. And the more you do of the things you want to do, the more tools you'll unlock to help you. IF you're a trader, you can unlock a bigger cargo bay. If you're a terraformers, you unlock more terraform tools, etc.
How you play is entirely up to you.
Man, if they'd done that with the civ stage, and let you have alot more choices to truly rule the planet (a loose trade federation,a group of allies, military conquest, etc.), that would have been sweet. But in any case...
The only constant enemy you'll have to deal with are the Grox... an, as yet, unknown (to me so far. I hear you can get to meet and ally with the Grox if you want, but I'm not there yet.). Oh, and Space Pirates. They tend to be a real hassle, and like to go after your colonies, if they aren't protected well. And, of course, you're the only one who can protect those colonies. Meet other aliens, make friendly with them (it helps to be willing to pick up missions from them. Though some aliens are more pre-disposed towards being friendly with you than others.). Trade with them.
And explore! Explore the ENTIRE universe. Look for rare items scattered around planets all around the universe, as well as alot of planet-shaping and planet-coloring tools.
In Review
Cell Stage - Decent. No complaints.
Creature Stage - Decent. Like the scavenger hunt aspect of the game. Like the creature creativity.
Tribe Stage - Meh
Civ Stage - Meh. Make Civ Stage more open-ended. Let me unify my planet the way my species would want to do that. And if you're going to give us city creativity, make this SimCity fan happy and give us more options! (They could do a city-based expansion set, such that there'd be benefits to more complex cities, such that.. being peaceful doesn't automatically mean you're gonna die.)
Space Stage - Awesome Awesome Awesome. :D
