Spore Game Review

I started this play session finishing the creature stage of the game. At this point, I had evolved my creature enough that it was completely to my liking. One fun thing the creature stage lets you do is, as you evolve further and further, you can recruit other members of your species to go hunting with you. You don't have direct control of these other members of your species, but they follow you around and attack whoever you attack. This creates a satisfying 'leader of the pack' mentality, as you go around taking down larger creatures as a team, and exploring areas that were too dangerous to explore before. I quickly evolved far enough to advance to the tribe stage, where you control a tribe of your species and build huts and other simple buildings and fight tribes of other species, like an real time strategy game. At this point, your control moves from one creature to a group of them, so the experience is less personal and you feel less involved in it all. Also, you cannot genetically evolve your creature anymore once this phase starts. However, by the time you get to this stage you can pretty much have customized your creature to look any way you want, so its ok. Also, you gain access to customizing the outfits your tribe of creatures wears. This provides fun breaks to the careful strategizing of the tribe stage to allow you to play dress up with your creatures, giving them all kinds of wacky, scary, and cool outfits.

The actual gameplay of the tribe stage was nothing special (it was basically a very simple version of Warcraft), but the game was still kept fun by the ability to customize the outfits and weapons (spears, clubs, ect) of your creatures, build up the tribes of your creatures, and go exploring for the evolved forms of creatures you encountered in the creature stage. That last part was very cool for awhile because I was having new encounters with old "friends." For example, some creatures I was used to trying to killing in the creature stage I would now periodically send my hunter tribesman out to kill and harvest for food. I could then store this food for my tribe to eat later. In this way, I was interacting in a new role with the creatures I was so familiar with -- I strange but fun feeling.

I eventually made it to the city stage, which plays like a combination of SimCity and Starcraft. At this point, your species has become the sole dominant one on the planet, and instead of fighting other species you fight other cities of your species, just like humans do today. Where as customization was less in the tribe stage, in the city stage there is tons of fun to be had customizing buildings, vehicles, and your city's national anthem. Just as with the creature editor, if you can dream it you can build it, and as you get more and more points you can builder cooler vehicles that have all kinds of different weapons and play strategies. You also get to customize the clothes of your creatures here as well, but the styles of clothing you can choose from include some much more modern ones. Putting my creature in a suit was very fun because it was something I never thought I'd see, and reminded me of just how far my species had come, in terms of its physical, mental, and social traits.

Design:
Spore is an incredibly innovative game that keeps people interested much more by the endless amount of content and customization than the actual gameplay. Yes, running around and killing other creatures is fun, but the reason it is fun is because your creature is completely your own creation, and the world you are exploring is never the same twice. I'll explore that first part first. The creature, building, and vehicle editors in this game are so incredibly robust that you can create whatever you've dreamt up in your mind. It allows you to take the things you dreamed of as a child and easily make them a reality. And on top of that, you get to control their progression through space and time in the universe. Essentially, you play as a god in this game, and the powers of god are a ton of fun. Now for the second part, the seemingly endless amount of creatures, buildings, and vehicles this game provides. To do this, is uploads the creations of players to a server and integrates them into your games both randomly and seamlessly, providing a different experience every game. This game is more an art gallery than a game. Most of the nostalgia comes from exploring the landscape and uncovering the awesome, scary, and wacky creations of others. Once you reach the space stage, you can explore and interact with literally hundreds of thousands of other player's creatures, cities, and vehicles, on thousands of planets in the game's galaxy. While a state machine must be finite, and so the gameplay of this game is finite, the human brain is different for every person and utterly complex, leading to endless possibilities in things that can be created.

On top of the fact that you get to explore and interact with an endless amount of other players' creations is the fact that you are still playing a single player game. This means you can fight, befriend, or completely destroy the planets of whatever other players' creatures you want without affecting those players' games (and fun). This is different from massively multiplayer games, where you as the player have no advantage over other players, because if you did it would ruin the game for everyone else. But in Spore, you have access to the content of every other players, can interact with it how you want, and no other players have to actually face the impact of those actions because you are playing in separate "universes."