So I had a chance to play Spore this week and SecuRom aside, it’s not a bad game at all. You start off as a tiny one celled organism and as you devour other cells and pieces of other cells your creature grows by filling up a progress bar. Also as you eat them and find meteor pieces you manage to acquire new parts to add to your cell at the cost of DNA points. You do this by mating your organism with another organism and then you add new parts to the next generation of cell until you have filled your progress bar up and you get to move on to the creature phase.
In the creature phase, you give your creature legs and move up on to dry land where you build nests and lay eggs. A few of your adaptations from cell phase don’t work here so you’re forced to start killing off weaker animals to gather up new parts to adapt your creature, giving it a better chance at surviving (Or in my case, turning it into a killing machine to rule the land). From there, after you fill your progress bar, your brain grows, leading your creature closer to sentience. When your brain is big enough, you move on to the tribal phase of the game.
In the tribal phase of the game, your creatures use their new found sentience to establish a stone age civilization with crude tools like stone axes for example, which are sharp rocks tied to sticks. Your creatures stem from a central hut which lays eggs at the cost of ten food a piece and you now hunt and gather, bringing your food back to the village instead of ripping pieces off to bring your health back up like you did in the creature phase. In this phase, the progress bar is filled by either making friends with neighboring tribes, or destroying neighboring tribes. Which ever floats your boat, it’s a great time to be had.
In the civilization phase you get to choose one of three methods of managing your city: Military, religious or economic. The game is pretty straight forward at this point. You create your city and basically try to conquer other cities through one of the three ways to use. Religion converts the city, Military conquers it, and Economic allows you to establish trade routes until you can eventually buy the cities. It was pretty cool. I got to send out some mechs and make a gun boat archetype to patrol the ocean of the planet.
In the space age phase, you pretty much control your planet through which ever means you chose. Your mission is to expand throughout the stars and meet new races and colonize new worlds. It was thrilling for me because when I took the second set of creatures out into the galaxy to meet people, the first race I came upon was my first race that I had created. You can establish trade routes to gain more money, form alliances with other races and even go as far as to terraform planets into habitable worlds. I actually had the chance to terraform a world myself and it was pretty neat. You create an atmosphere and then bring plants and animals from your world to that world and do what needs to be done until the colony lowers it’s shield and the people can survive without the shield.
One of the neat things about most of the phases is that you cannot die. Your cell is replaced by another one as you go on and your creature is replaced by hatching another one as well. This is great because it lets you get used to the game without having to worry about game over. It’s hard to die in the third stage too because you can only die if your hut is destroyed. If your whole tribe gets wiped out, you get to make a new set of tribal people from eggs at the cost of 10 food a piece. In the space age, if your ship gets destroyed you end up getting cloned and they rebuild your ship for you.
It has its draw backs as well. Like SecuRom, as was mentioned in the article written by Matsuke. And a few flaws here and there like the fact that four legged creatures aren’t faster than two legged creatures for example. But really those flaws I found in it don’t take away from the game that much. Over all the positive outweighs the negative aspects of the game.
I really enjoyed playing this game in the couple of days I’ve had it and frankly, I give this game a Gold Cylon.
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