Spore review (Spore (PC))

Member Name: NuclearPancake

Product:	Spore (PC)
Date:	01/09/09 (9 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A large universe,automatically downloading creatures ect,incrediable customisation

Disadvantages: A lot of tech issues,lack of diversity in behaviour from the start,space stage will bore you, limite

Spore developed by Maxis for those who have played it you will either have been engrossed or disappointed unfortunatly i am the latter.

Spore follows the story of a species (which arrives on a Earth-like planet in a meteorite) as it slowly evolves through time, you play as you own designed creature which you can upgrade with anything from fangs to feathers as time progresses.

Features:
5 unique stages of development from cell to space
Large set of customisation options skin patterns to lumps
Ability to download creatures, buildings and vehicles

Customisation is a building block of this game but the problem is that in order to customise your avatar race, you will have to find parts and parts are only obtainable through killing creatures with that part on their body or finding it in a pile of bones and so those people hoping to create a dragon race are going to have explore or get lucky in finding their desired parts. So if you are lazy and just what to rush the creature stage, you will find that on each playthrough your creatures start to look similar.

There are 5 stages Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilisation and Space and personally my favorite stage is cell where you fight other cells of similar size to survive depending on whether you are a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore, you will need to eat protein bits or other cells for food, eat algae or both, as you grow there will be bigger 'fish' which will try to eat you and being smaller and weaker, you will need to flee.

The worse stage is Tribal where all you have to do is make friends with or destroy 4 other tribes and since fighting is a heck of a lot easier in most difficulties, you will find yourself a war mongering tribe by the end of it.

Not far behind Tribal is Space in which you will visit various planets and form alliances or start wars with other species, the prospect of space is very exciting and at first you are quite happy with the new tools, abilites and places at your command but as time progresses you look past the form an alliance here and investigate this, to the broad objective which is ... explore.

Maybe this is an indirect message saying that once humans hit the space 'stage', the only objective as a species we will have is to explore and since there may be different planets with 'intelligent' life that is an exciting objective however in Spore this is not the case, as you will meet species A with Ships A and Buildings A and basically you will get bored very quickly with the lack of variety in culture, design and language as all creatures seem to communicate with speech in the exact same dialect.

Summary: For those with an eye for customisation and an evolution simulator