Mini Review: Spore
Will Wright's (of SimCity and The Sims fame) Spore was released on September 4th, a game I've been eagerly awaiting since seeing demonstration videos of the game back in 2005. I must admit I've kept myself out of the loop, so that the anticipation and inevitable long wait didn't kill me. Unfortunately it wasn't until after 'completing' the game that I learnt it was designed for the casual gamer (in other words, its an extremely shallow, cutesy and repetitive game). 'Completing' is something you can never do for Wright's games it would seem (being all sandbox games essentially), but I use the term in sense of 'done-anything-I-was-going-to-do-in-the-game-and-have-now-uninstalled-it'.
Most of my gripes are particularly with the Space Age, because that is where the majority of the game is situated (as it only took two hours to progress through spore, creature, tribal and civilisation stages combined). During the Space Age, the game tries to do too much and unfortunately it can't pull it off with the shallow/basic gameplay route. If you can get past the tedious nature of being the universes defender against biological disasters and the occasional pirates which steal spice one unit at a time, Spore presents a very basic trading game. There is no way to tell who you've visited or sold to in the past, no way to predict what they'll pay for your spices on the next trip, and the only way to see is to fly into their solar system and around their planet – urgh! Oh yes, you're supposed to be wowed at the supreme power you wield to terraform a planet, but the only reason you do that is to generate more spice to trade. The excitement of terraforming a world and building a new slave factory colony is diminished when all you have to do is hold down the left mouse button after selecting the appropriate tool.
While you're conquering the universe in the name of…well whatever you named your Empire, you'll often get called back to 'duty' to prevent a planets ecological disaster. Oh dear, a nuclear accident? A planet hurtling dangerously close to a sun? A meteor on its way? No. Some animals mutated/got sick, they now have glowing tails, and you have to kill the five mutants (it always seems to be five) before they infect the rest of the species and they become extinct; failure to do so will repeat the process slowly eliminating all creatures from a planet. That's the best they could come up with? It wouldn't be too bad if you weren't either asked to do that for your empire and all your allies or recalled thousands of light years away, through several worm holes away during the middle of large scale battles.
Speaking of space battles, as you start off you are in an understandably weak vessel with limited weaponry, but as the game progresses you can buy new weapons as well as upgrade existing ones. The problem is, only one enemy race seems to have weapons that can approach or rival yours and even then its limited to their spacecrafts – their cities can be wiped out with a single bomb (MegaBomb, doesn't cost anything to use) making combat quick and easy, you spend most of the time scrolling in and out of solar systems.
With the amount of grinding (eliminate this set of creatures, abduct that alien/plant, scan this surface) in the game, it just feels too much like a single player MMORPG. Perhaps I was just expecting too much from Spore, at the end of the day I really just wanted less Sims-in-Space, and more SimCity-on-a-universal-scale.