I’ve always liked growth / simulation games. Some of my favorites are the SimCity and Civilization series games so you could imagine how interested I was when I first heard of Spore. It seemed like a modern version of a cross between SimLife and Civilization. In my book that has a lot of potential.
Unfortunately, the game did not live up to my expectations. My biggest disappointment - the game is extremely linear to me. Sure, you can dsign your own species of intelligent life and start from scratch but the game itself is a little boring and monotonous.
You start off as a microorganism and you need to eat plants or meat (or other animals). OK, this can be interesting. As you go, you find evolutionary add-ons (beaks, poison etc..) that will alow you to grow and become more powerful. As you go on with this level, it becomes boring after a few levels.
Finally, you make it onto land. You are a creature who needs to built intelligence and you can either destroy or ally with other creatures. This can require some skill but with a little pratice, it can easily be mastered. There are dozens of opprotunities here to get evolutionary powerups.
Next, you are sentient / intellignet but tribal. You need to conquer other tribes either though allying with them or destroying them (sounds familiar?). While this part can be fun, it is extremely repetitive and will get boring after a few times you go though this level.
Next is the intelligent / modern day level. This is actually quite boring. Again, you must either destroy (conquer) or ally with all of your rivals. By this time I was bored with the repetiveness of the game. You have three kinds of unites, land, sea, air (and only one of each kind).
Finally, you’re in the space race. You can fly to other planets and guess what? You can either make allies / trade partners or destroy / conquer other civilizations. Wow. Where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, you only have one space ship (you can get get allies to fly with you depending on your level).
The graphics in the game are not that bad and do not choke my system (Intel Core2 1.8GHz, 2GB Gam, 512MB Video, not shared running XP home SP3) which is hard to find in today’s games (everyone tries to cram as much as they can into one game killing systems that even meet the “recommended system requirements”). The control is easy to learn and simple to use.
The game had a lot of potential but did not live up to the hype in my eyes. On a scale of one to ten I give the game a 4. The easy to learn gameplay is what helped the game keep a score that high but the redundancy is a killer.