Review: Spore

Joe takes a crack at Spore but finds himself unsatisfied.

"In his native land he was a king!  But he comes before you in chains for your own amusement!" - C. Montgomery Burns

Over the past three years, EA has been promoting Spore like it was their King Kong, first with a tech demo, then a Will Wright/Robin Williams presentation duo, then the release of the Creature Creator, so I can't say I was surprised to find the game sitting on my desk when I came into the office earlier this week. What did shock me, however, was that it took Will Wright and EA eight years to get the game out the door, and how inconsistent the experience is.

Intelligent Design in the Soup Primordial
The game begins epically. The "new game" interface shows a group of planets within a galaxy, and when you select one it becomes your starting world, which you can name. I scanned deep within my pop culture reserves to come up with a name that was both silly and deferential to our own homeworld. And behold: Earf was born.

What followed was a creation scene in which an asteroid crashes into Earf and introduces primordial genesis. From there I entered the Cell Stage and the Creature Creator. You can choose what your little guy eats to begin with - herbivores zoom around and munch on plankton, carnivores eat other cells and floating dead meat. I went carnivore and received a beak-like mouth that doubled as a weapon against other cells.

My cell ended up looking like a caricature of a fish, but before I could get out into the wild, I had to come up with a name for my species. Again I went back to pop culture, looking for a hero that could defend Earf and also represent what makes the real world so great. Enter: Will Smif, star of stage and screen and defender of the planet in a host of movies.

And into the drink I went, a little cell in a big world. When I first laid eyes upon this ocean, brimming with nascent life, I had to stop to catch my breath. It was like looking into a microscope for the first time: stumbling upon a world that until a few moments ago was literally beneath your notice. It's beautiful, and just watching events unfold, you feel a connection to the game, if only because you know we all came from the frothing community the Cell Stage simulates.

Once I regained control of my senses, I started clicking around. Will Smif followed along, eating at first dead cell remains. It plays a lot like a mix of fl0w and Pac-man; you float around and eat stuff and try to avoid being eaten.

After Will Smif gulped down a few more, he grew in size, which let me begin eating cells smaller than me and begin earning badges that let me add new features to my cell in the Creature Creator. I ended up outfitting him with spikes near his mouth to help him attack bigger cells, and an electrode on his tail that stunned attackers from the rear. Not a bad outfitting; if I could tip my Intelligent Designer cap to myself, I would.

I'd grown enough to progress to the Creature phase, where your cell grows legs and makes its way onto land as an actual animal, after playing for a half hour. Thirty minutes. Three zero. I was just getting used to the controls, and it was already time to learn how to walk. I actually said aloud, "That's it?" Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last time.

The Life Vertebral With Will Smif
Again I landed in the Creature Creator, this time ready to give Will Smif a spinal cord, head and body. I ended up turning my creature into something vaguely human, which was a bit disconcerting, since a lot of the pre-release hype pegged the game as an evolution simulator, when there's clearly nothing evolutionary about picking and choosing every aspect of your creature from stage to stage.

With a new and improved Will Smif, I strode the lush swamps of Earf in search of new and exciting things to do. The first thing I discovered was a nest of other Will Smifs, about five in all, including a couple babies. And while my actions wouldn't affect them, as I progressed in the Creature Phase, I'd end up having to chase them all over the map as the group decided to move its nest.

What's most remarkable about Creature Phase, though, is how dull and poorly crafted it is compared to the Cell Phase. Gameplay consists of Fed-Ex quests from an MMOG, only there's no one around to ***** about the quests with you.

Here's how Creature Phase breaks down:
1) Find another creature.
2a) Attack and eat said creature.
2b) Dance and sing with said creature, until it's willing to join your pack. After which, it'll help you with option 2a or 2b when you come across other creatures.
3) Repeat until your brain grows big enough to advance to the Tribe Phase.

Admittedly, that's a simplistic viewpoint. While the gameplay is boring, Creature Phase is where you do all the actual evolving your creature will do for the rest of the game. As you run around the globe killing or friending everyone you see, you discover new traits you can give your creature - like a bigger mouth that gives you new attacks or a better singing voice. But what's really frustrating is you can tailor your character as you like, depending on your situation.

Run into a creature you can't kill? Go back to your nest, find a mate, strip your character to its bones and toss on all the body parts with social bonuses you can find. Now that you're buddies, wanna go eradicate another creature's nest? Go mate again, and turn into a killing machine. It takes a lot of the challenge out of the stage - it's literally God mode.

After sampling my options, I ended up outfitting Will Smif to be a killing machine, complete with razor-sharp hands and barbed genitals, since it takes longer to make friends than it does to eradicate them, which mercifully shortened the phase down to about an hour. Getting through it felt a lot longer, yet at the end, I still wondered, "That's it?" It was like watching a bad movie without a climax.

The Gods Must Be Crazy
Walking tall with my big brain, I advanced to the Tribe Phase, which while similar to Creature Phase, played much better. Rather than wandering Earf alone, I now had an entire village of Will Smifs, who put up stakes on a quiet peninsula. As their leader, it was up to me to help them take over the globe as the dominant species.

It's in the Tribe Phase that the Creature Creator changes, giving you outfit options rather than the option to physically change your creature. In practice, it works similarly to before: Different pieces of clothing provide different bonuses, and you can tinker with the outfits as often as you like. 

You spend much of the first portion of the phase resource gathering. Send a hunter out to take down adult creatures still in Creature Phase without destroying the entire herd, use the food the hunter brings back to create babies, who you can then turn into hunters to get more food. This really was an interesting touch; you have to be environmentally conscious to keep your food supply breeding, or you're going to wind up walking miles in search of more livestock. It really betrays how deep each phase of Spore's phases could've been, but instead highlights how shallow some of Maxis' choices were in other areas.

Another nice touch was early in the Tribe Phase, when I heard a weird bass noise and saw a huge shadow on the ground, then panned up the camera and saw a spaceship hovering over my village. Down came a tractor beam and abducted one of the creatures I'd befriended in the Creature Phase (any creature you socialize with in that stage starts off domesticated, like a pet). Then, the spaceship flew away. Spore isn't without it's artistic touches, and events like this give each species its own story, even if it only belongs to you.

Once you make contact with other tribes, befriending or killing them gives you new buildings you can place in your village by way of the village editor. You can add new weapons to help your hunters and warriors, like buildings that give you stone axes, fiery torches or throwing spears; instrument huts that create didgeridoos, horns or maracas to help you befriend or impress other tribes; and upgrades like fishing huts or healing wands that provide you with a steadier food supply or give your warriors longer staying time in battle.

The objectives are similar to Creature Phase - make friends or kill everything in sight - but the Tribe Phase plays a lot smoother, if only because there's more to manage to take your mind off of the basic call to action.

I ended up going the military route and rid Earf of my other sentient competitors, which earned me the right to advance to Civilization Phase, where I'd be up against my own kind to unify the globe and begin a quest for the stars. Again, though, this phase is terribly short. It took maybe 45 minutes to get through it, and definitely left me wanting more.

The Hottest Cold War In History
Now that Will Smif had dominated the globe, the race was able to grow into a true civilization, complete with cities, different governments, and a (as in one) natural resource to mine. Since your creature won't evolve anymore, you'll spend more time in the city editor, which lets you place four types of structures: a city hall, houses, factories and entertainment centers.

The city hall serves as the city center, and how you place the others determines the city's output, population and happiness. For example, if you surround a factory with houses, your city's productivity will shoot through the roof, but your citizens will be less happy. If you focus too much in the other direction, you'll have a bunch of happy layabouts. I went for balance in Will Smif City, which kept me well financed but didn't cause the peasants to revolt.

Each city doesn't give you much room or expansion. You can place between five and eight buildings in all. It's definitely not Sim City; it's more like a shallow version of the city screen in the Civilization games.

You can design each building from the ground up, and the building editor could claim years from your life with the bevy of options at your disposal. It's like playing blocks with a paint set and whittling knife. Anyone with a history of Lincoln Log or LEGO dependency may go into the Spore building editor and never come out.

I gave the Will Smifs a tasteful, octagonal building motif, with red accents to highlight their red skin, then set about building my first vehicle, which also becomes available in the Civilization Phase. Your vehicle is dual purpose: You can use it to create mines to generate income and also go to war with other civilizations. I opted for an ATV-inspired model with tank treads and giant guns protruding from either side. As you progress, you can create seafaring vessels as well as airplanes, all of which let you get as in depth as you like with their design.

With my city under way and my vehicle scooting around the planet, it was time to meet new Will Smifs, explore their culture and conquer them. Going to war is pretty basic: Grab your vehicle and target the city. If you fancy yourself a tactician, you can target the city's city hall, because once it dies, so does the city.

Once you beat up another civilization a bit, they'll capitulate to you and cede their remaining cities. This gives you a chance to create new vehicles with different themes. I'll admit, I didn't play around with this much, because by the time I noticed I had that option, I'd forced every civilization on Earf into submission and was ready to enter the Space Phase. The Civilization Phase was, like those before it, really, really short. It took me another 45 minutes to blow through it, and it didn't leave me very hopeful for the wide expanse of the cosmos.

To Seek Out New Life And Civilizations ... And Blow Them Up

And so, after less than four hours of playtime under my belt, Will Smif had a new spaceship to design. The process was much like the vehicle designs in the Civilization Phase, and by this point I was a bit overwhelmed with options, so I just hit "random" a few times until I got something decent-looking, then painted it the Will Smif species' colors.

As soon as you enter space, you receive a hailing frequency from your home planet, where another member of your species gives you tips on space travel, missions to accomplish and a place to buy and sell stuff. And as you find new species in other star systems, this is how you'll end up communicating with them, via a comm screen. They'll also provide you with missions, which boosts your standing with them and usually gives you money to spend on ship and planet upgrades.

It really is Space Phase where Spore comes into its own. The rest of the game is clearly a prelude to this, and aside from determining if your species is militaristic, economic or religious, it doesn't really affect much of what you do in space. For instance, the Will Smifs are militaristic, but I've gotten badges (which act like achievements and give you access to weapon and item upgrades) for exploration and trade, as well as warfare. What you do in the previous phases doesn't feel like a waste, but I did feel a bit miffed when I realized I put work into creating a unique species, only to be confined to a spaceship for the remainder of the game.

And oh, what your spaceship can do. It's capable of interstellar travel, in-space combat, planetary combat, abducting other species of plants and animals, collecting spice from planets you control and terraforming planets to make them more habitable. While you're stuck in the thing forever, it doesn't feel constraining, if only because it's a one-stop shop. This is where you make your people rich, fight wars and forge alliances.

You expand your empire by (at first) colonizing empty planets, which produce spice you can trade within your empire or with other species. Planets are rated T0-T3, T0 being a barren, moon-like planet, T3 sharing features with Earth. You can start colonizing planets once they're T1, but T3 planets allow you to place more cities and increase spice production.

By the time I was ready to add a third planet to my empire, I found a T3 planet that wasn't claimed by any spacefaring empire, but was inhabited by a sentient race still in Civilization Phase. I had an ethical moment of pause: Is it really right to wipe a species off a planet so I can place colonies of my own, and will the interstellar community frown upon me for doing so? In the interests of science, I gave it a shot. I plunged into the atmosphere and fired on the first city I could find, leveling it in a few short moments before repeating the process over and over again. Once I destroyed the last sign of the old species, I was able to place a colony of my own and claim the planet without any diplomatic repercussions.

Moral of the story: We Earthlings need to make First Contact. Yesterday.

Since I was able to check "global holocaust" off my list, I figured I'd play out the diplomatic angle a bit more, and began exploring space, looking for new friends. I ended up finding about three spacefaring civilizations near me, two economic and one religious, and set about forming trade routes with each of them. Trade routes allow you to earn money (duh) and eventually buy a star system from another empire. The systems aren't cheap (they start at 500,000 sporebucks, roughly the cost of placing four colonies on a planet), and the more capable the system is of producing spice, the more they cost.

Early in the game, economic conquest is the most effective, since it takes a while to outfit your ship with the weapons you'll need to actually take over large swaths of space. Also, the more friends you make early on, the more access you have to allied spaceships, which will support you in combat. And what good is an interstellar space game without epic conflict?

By the time I found my fifth species, I figured it was time to make enemies rather than friends. They, like the Will Smifs, were also militaristic, so I initiated contact with them in a blustery manner, then proceeded to attack their closest star system.

Combat takes place primarily inside a planet's atmosphere. When you attack, the defending planet scrambles defensive spaceships to keep you from destroying their cities. With enough backup - by this time, I had three allied ships flying in formation with me - they're more of an annoyance than they are a challenge. Once you take them out, it's onto destroying the cities, much like you did in Civilization Phase. When there's one city left on the planet, your enemy will usually offer to give up the planet in return for his species' safe passage home. It's up to you to let them go, and if you do, you get to keep the city.

I ended up rolling my new enemy and taking over his empire, which in itself presented a new problem: I'd expanded my empire beyond my ability to micromanage it.

Micromanagement becomes the name of the game in Space Phase. Remember all that spice your colonies produce? You have to harvest it from every single one. Even better, the planets all have maximum spice capacities, so if you don't harvest fast enough, you'll cease to operate at peak efficiency, ultimately making you poorer. But let's say you're a clicking fiend and able to harvest all the spice your little space arms can carry. Now, you've gotta fly from planet to planet peddling your wares, in search of the best price for each type of spice. There's multiple colors of spice, and each carry different prices on different planets.

When you're trying to run a war, or just explore the damn universe, this is incredibly tedious. You'd think after spanning the galaxy, you'd be able to hire an executive assistant to pick up the space equivalent of your dry cleaning, but you'd be wrong.

Space Phase's problems don't end there. The map, if you can call it that, is really just a zoomed-out camera angle with filters you can turn on and off to indicate who owns what, where you've been or get a vague idea of where your missions may take you. You can't search for star systems you've been to, there's no way to tell if there's any spice to harvest unless you actually enter a star system and God forbid if you have to move from one end of your empire to the other since there's no easy way to plot a course, either. To make matters worse, some missions are timed, like when pirates attack your home system.

As a former EVE Online player, a game that made space incredibly navigable, Spore's emphasis on micromanagement without giving you the tools to do it effectively is mindboggling. If anything keeps me from playing again, it's this.

So ultimately, the Will Smifs have grown beyond their commander, who just wants to explore space and go to war without having to fight with doing the type of resource management your SCVs in StarCraft do. It's a tough life.

What's frustrating about this is if Maxis had spent more time limiting the micromanaging, or had allowed civilizations to evolve out of needing spice to expand (or even just making gathering it automatic), Spore's Space Phase would've been one of the best games I've played. Let's look at this hypothetical brave new game and add the fact that as I could travel the universe, I'd interact with an unlimited number of species out there created by other people playing the game, one of the most exciting features to hit games in a long time.

I know how cool it is, because a friend of mine who got his hands on the game early was able to download my Will Smifs, who entered space roughly when he did. Now they're allies and probably play space basketball together on weekends.

However, I don't think I'll get a chance to expand out to meet his civilization, just because I can't expand anymore. And maybe my problem matches Spore's underlying one: The game is just too big for itself.

Circling The Event Horizon
If you look at Spore's phase progression, it's a simulator of game evolution, not the evolutionary process of life. You've got Pac-man in Cell Phase, action/adventure RPGs games in Creature Phase, Populous in Tribe Phase, Sim City/Civ in Civilization Phase and the 4X space games in Space Phase. Academically, that's really cool. Academically, much of the game is fascinating. But where the rubber hits the road, when you're playing the game, you just end up wondering why you're not playing the games Spore tries to simulate.

If I come across as overly negative, I don't mean to. The game isn't bad, it's just disappointing. If I may use a baseball analogy, it has warning track power; that is, everything about it looks like a home run but somehow falls 10 feet short of the fence and lands in the fielder's glove for an out. Spore's not a bad game; it's a good game that should've been great.

Joe Blancato is Editor in Chief of Giant Realm. He watched way too much Independence Day when he was a kid.

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