A Review of EA's Spore

I spent much of my day off playing Spore, and I have some initial impressions. I ultimately judge a game by its cost-per-entertainment hour to decide how good it is; this helps me put aside expectations from hype and anticipation. Based on yesterday alone I am roughly at $5 per hour so far ($50 purchase / roughly 10 hours of playtime). I had expected that cost-per-hour would fall much further over the coming weeks, but unfortunately there are very serious problems in the game's final stage....more on that later.

For the first few phases the game work and run well; there were no crashes or problems playing on both 32-Bit and 64-bit versions of Vista. It ran smooth and looks great on my 1-year old PC. My 1-month old PC runs it with maxed-out settings across the board with no problem.

The game itself is a lot more simplistic and dumbed-down than I thought it might be. It was written for a mass-audience, not exclusively for data-focused eccentrics like me. That does not have to be a bad thing, but it does mean this game does not tickle my mind as much as I might like. Unless expansions and enhancements come out later (and I am sure they will), re-playability will be limited.

The game begins with just a little multi-celled organism trying to find bits of material to eat and grow. This cell-phase is quite limited and amounts to little more than a mini-game I might play a couple times. There are no penalties for letting your organism die and there are no real rewards for thriving. Fortunately this stage can be skipped after you complete it once. Nothing you do in this phase has any affect on the outcome or details of later phases.

Next is the creature phase, and it offers a bit more pleasure of wandering around a landscape and either befriending or eradicating other species. This is the stage where you can actively change the shape, appearance, and physical characteristics of your creature. This creature evolution is the most fun part of the experience in this phase. The downside that bothers me is the limited way in which physical characteristics affect creature survivability. While adding horns and claws may make the a creature fight better, other factors that should matter do not. For example, if I make a big fat hippo-like herbivore I would expect that it would have a high strength and formidable constitution. Consequently I would expect it to require far more calories to sustain. In this game size is irrelevant; a tiny mole-like creature needs the same amount of food as towering elephant-like monster with six legs and two heads. As long as the two creatures have the same “health” components, they will also have the same amount of health and attack capability. That is just all wrong.

The basic limiting factor that will determine whether one creature can befriend or eliminate another is its accumulated DNA points. These points are gathered by interacting with other species and spent like currency. They determine how many enhancements you can add to a creature. The troublesome aspect of these DNA points is that they will easily accumulate to the same max value every time with any creature you create, and no matter how you play. If I wanted a more accurate evolutionary-based game I would want to see each new creature I create forced to adapt its physical characteristics to some elements of the surrounding environment and competing species. That would tickle the mind a lot more, but there is none of that here. The randomness and chance aspects of real-world evolution are not a significant part of this game, and that will limit is re-playability for me.

After the creature phase is over you can advance to the tribal phase. At this point physical evolution ceases and your creature will basically look the same the rest of the game. However, it will acquire a small selection of clothing and armors that can give various bonuses. These clothing items and armors are very limited in scope. The tribal phase moves the user from controlling an individual creature to controlling a small group. As in the previous phase, the ultimate point is to collect food and either befriend or destroy other species. There are a small number of buildings that can be built to support these activities, and like the clothing they are very limited in variety. They cannot be upgraded or mix-and-matched to make your ideal tribe; one of each type is the limit.

Advancement to the civilization phase is next, and the game gets a bit more interesting here. This stage of the game offers the ability to make vehicles and buildings. The design options are practically unlimited and I spent a lot of time just making different kinds of cars, airplanes, boats, and buildings. The goal of this phase is to consolidate all the cities of your species into one global empire. As previous stages, this can be done peacefully or through force. At its core the civilization phase is not all that different from the Civilization games by Sid Meier. You construct units, move them around a map and manage a few cities. The Spore version, however, is much more simplified and watered down. It is certainly not meant to be as epic in scale as the Civilization series, but just offers a taste of building a global empire with your now civilized creatures.

The final phase of the game, the space phase, is the largest and most open-ended of all. In this stage your now-super-advanced beings gain the technology to travel to other planets, terraform them, and interact with other empires that other people have created. Unfortunately this phase contains a bug which essentially renders it unplayable. I'll call it the "zoom-out-of-home-world" bug and it has spawned a massive post on Spore's technical support forum. Once this bug sets in the game crashes or freezes every time you fly out of your home world, which you have to do quite frequently. I've found it is pretty much pointless to try and continue any further in the space phase until this bug is fixed.

Another problem I have had in this space phase is that I cannot seem to get a moment's peace to explore, terraform, and grow my empire. Random alien attacks occur so often and cost so much "money" to recover from that trying to do anything else is almost impossible. I was basically just flying from one planet to another defending my settlements and repairing them...until the game-halting bug set in.

So far I must recommend NOT buying this game in its present state. Playing in the first few phases is fine, but they do not justify its $50 price tag. The final space phase is broken from both a technical and gameplay standpoint, and Spore will remain a dust-collector on my shelf until EA fixes it.

From past experience I know EA will probably fix the problems, but it may take many weeks or months. I look foreword to playing more Spore again someday when it has been fixed and maybe some expansions have been made available. For now....AVOID SPORE!