Spore was probably one of the most anticipated games of all time.  Delay after delay, people wanted to get their hands on Spore all the more. But did Spore live up to the hype? Did it live up to its own ambition?

Spore is set in five different phases: the cell phase, the creature phase, the tribal phase, the civilization phase and the space phase. With each progressing phase the player created creature evolves and advances more and more, starting as a single cell and eventually becoming a space traveling empire.

The cell phase is pretty fun (though extremely short). It feels somewhat like a classic game along the lines of Pac-man, you just swim around and eat other cells to get stronger and gather new parts to you creature.

The creature phase is interesting. Creating your creature and giving it different abilities is cool, and it’s interesting to think of the possibilities (should my creature be some kind of lizard man or a gorilla/walrus hybrid? Maybe I should make a wing-a-ling dragon. ect.), but the gameplay itself isn’t really that fun at all in the creature phase. You just kind of run around attacking some creatures and befriending others for a couple of hours and then your done.

The tribal phase can be entertaining, but it’s really nothing outside of an average real time strategy game. You (once again) can choose to befriend or battle the other tribes of creatures and find enough resources to advance your creatures. Even worse is that your creature becomes nothing more than a basic grunt unit found in other RTSs, so all the cool moves and abilities you gave him in the creature phase are no more, which makes it seem really pointless that you did it to begin with.

The civilization phase is really just a slightly more advanced version of the tribal phase, only now you also get to design buildings, air-crafts, boats, ect. I do like this phase a bit more than the previous two because of all the customization for you cities and vehicles, but once again everything you did previously seems borderline pointless, and the gameplay is nothing particularly special either.

The space phase is probably the best phase. You now travel across the cosmos, terraforming planets and discovering new species all across the universe, it’s a lot more fun than the other phases, and changing planets to your liking is fun, but it still just isn’t what it could have been. The good thing is now you can at least see your creature properly again…Because I really started to miss those little guys…

And that’s Spore in a nutshell really…

Spore’s ambition was what made people so excited for Spore, unfortunately, the game itself just couldn’t quite live up to it. I knew from the start that the space phase was going to be the main priority of the game, but I was expecting the other stages to seem important in their own way, but they all become pretty insignificant the further you progress and none of them are quite as fun as they could have been given how long the game was in development.

Is Spore a bad game? Not at all. But when the creation tools outshine the gameplay as much as they do, it isn’t anything to brag about. I would recommend Spore for the creation aspects of it, but the fun factor isn’t anything special.

Squablo!

(1 votes, average: 7.00 out of 10, rated)

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