Rating of
3/5
There’s No God Here Today. Just Me.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/11/18
“Spore” is the incredibly ambitious life/god Simulation title that served as the culmination of both Maxis Software founder, Will Wright’s vision of the genre, and EA’s ability to ruin everything they touch. Released in 2008 after years of hype, “Spore” ultimately flopped in the public eye thanks in large part to EA’s SecuROM DRM scheme, but also thanks to Wright overselling the project pre-launch and the Maxis team being forced to make cuts and revisions that obsessed fans could not tolerate. I, as a PC gaming apostate during the years of “Spore’s” hype generation and release, didn’t really give a fig about it one way or the other. I did, however, see Chris playing the creature stage at one point, and thought the game looked like it had potential as a follow-up to the likes of “EVO: The Search for Eden” on the SNES and “Seventh Cross: Evolution” on the Dreamcast, both of which I really liked. Thus, when “Spore” landed on GOG.com in 2016 – one year after the digestion of Maxis in its totality by EA – as “The Spore Collection,” including all of the DLC but none of the DRM for one low sale price of $10, I knew it was finally time for me to experience this hyped, ambitious title in all of its glory. Or lack thereof.
Presentation
Be it in visuals, audio, or technical, “Spore” is incredibly mediocre across the board.
While the art style is decidedly unique and the creatures the player can create using the editor have a cartoony appeal to them, that’s really the extent of “Spore’s” graphical prowess. “Spore” relies on an uncomfortable mix of procedural generation and user-generated content to populate itself, and while Maxis did create an overwhelming number of assets in the game’s editor, none of them are particularly artful or impressive. Likewise, in the face of the remarkable fact that EA is still keeping-up the game’s servers a decade after the fact, I was unimpressed by the user-generated content that dribbled into my game from the Internet (and no, I didn’t see any penis monsters). The full editor included in “Spore” is a lot more robust than the cut-down editor in the Wii spin-off, “Spore Hero,” but is still limited by the style of collectible body parts, so the player will always end up with a creation that looks like it was made in “Spore.” The editor for vehicles and buildings is even more limited, and ultimately rather boring, which explains why subsequent “Spore” titles have laser focused on the creatures.
The audio is generally quite bland and innocuous. The soundtrack may as well not exist, though in certain phases of the game it’s possible for the player to create ‘anthems’ for their civilizations in an incredibly limited way. Primitive creatures in the game honk and hoot at each other with a handful of different animal sounds, while civilized creatures speak a number of gibberish languages with a handful of different tones.
Technically, “Spore” shows itself as being from that uncomfortable period in PC gaming history when Xinput hadn’t yet been embraced and resolutions were fairly low. “Spore” is almost entirely mouse-driven, but with WASD support for movement, and features a horrifically-designed UI that makes everything a chore. If not for the Steam controller, I don’t think I could have played it effectively! On top of that, playing at anything near a modern resolution makes the UI so small it’s impossible to see, and the game suffers from a lot of screen tearing, but has no v-sync option (you have to force it in the video card driver utility). The sole shining aspect of “Spore’s” technical presentation is the fact that EA finally – FINALLY – removed the SecuROM DRM that plagued the game at launch. “Spore” is officially DRM-free on GOG.com as of 2016, but in order to connect to the miraculously long-lived servers to experience user-generated content, it’s necessary to take the CD keys from the GOG version and activate them on EA’s Origin client. Figuring this out wasn’t intuitive and required a trip to GOG’s support forum, but gaining access to the server was ultimately a painless process.
Story
“Spore” is the story of life. The story of evolution… badly Bowdlerized into a handful of flash-forward swaths of time.
The player begins a typical game of “Spore” with a procedurally generated cell. The player is then free to direct this cell’s behavior, ultimately taking it through the chain of biological evolution and leading it out of the primordial ooze onto land, then toward civilization, and ultimately space exploration, with the ultimate goal of reaching the center of the galaxy (“No Man’s Sky” totally stole that!). There are no real narrative events or strong plots that emerge from this style of storytelling, leaving lore-hungry players out in the cold.
However, in an apparent attempt to placate those seeking more plot in their game, Maxis added a DLC called “Galactic Adventures” that allows players with fully-evolved spacefaring creatures to beam-down to planets, “Star Trek” style, in order to take on a variety of story driven missions. Unfortunately, in my experience “Galactic Adventures” are flat-out HORRIBLE. The game kept feeding me the same handful of missions over and over and over (and the player’s Captain who goes on these adventures only gains experience for completing them the first time, so repeats are completely pointless). Even worse, most of these missions were user generated, and half of them weren’t even in English.
Those who are awed simply by the grand scale of life and the universe – which “Spore” captures quite well – will likely enjoy the game from a story perspective for that alone, but those seeking compelling narratives and well-developed characters will find “Spore” rather empty and boring. I feel like I took my time with “Spore,” and managed to finish just shy of 40 hours, which isn’t particularly long for a game that prides itself on being infinite.
Gameplay
“Spore’s” meat & potatoes is its diverse gameplay. One could reasonably declare that “Spore” is ‘The PC Game,’ since it encompasses so many aspects of old-school PC-specific genres. The reason “Spore’s” gamplay is so diverse and all over the place is that each phase of the player’s creature’s evolution has a slightly different style:
The Cell Phase sees the player in a kind of open-world “Pac-Man” scenario with clunky mouse-move controls where their newly generated cell must eat (either plants or flesh) in order to grow. The player is free to mate with other cells and change their cell’s appearance by adding any parts acquired from other cells (typically by killing them), which can lead to new abilities.
The Creature Phase – the one everyone got excited about – sees the player’s fully matured cell leaving behind its watery origins and heading toward land. Here, the creature explores the procedurally generated surface of a procedurally generated planet in search of DNA. DNA can be acquired by finding the bones of extinct species, befriending various species of creature (via social skills, like singing and dancing), or killing and eating various species of creature (via aggressive skills, like biting and spitting). This phase is essentially a third-person Action game, with a mix of super clunky mouse-based camera controls and WASD. Evolving the creature to have better parts with more powerful social or aggressive skills is key to success.
The Tribal Phase sees the player’s creature gain sentience, forming a small group to compete against other newly-sentient species. The player can build special buildings around their village hut that contain power-ups (again, social or aggressive), while the overarching goal is to either befriend or wipe-out the other tribes, all while collecting enough food to keep the tribe fed and populated. This phase plays like an incredibly simple RTS. Thankfully, “Spore” has a pause button, allowing players to assign commands and clunkily move around the map without worrying about the real-time aspects.
The Civilization Phase sees the player’s dominant creature spread across the face of its planet, forming a number of different cities. It’s up to the player to unit their planet under their own banner, either through diplomacy, religion, or violence. This phase also plays out as a simplified RTS, though not quite as simplified as the Tribal Phase. Civilizations are after a resource known as Spice (like from the “Dune” novels), and collecting Spice by controlling Spice mines provides the player with the currency they need to build vehicles, buildings, and defences.
Finally, the Space Phase sees the player’s creature’s civilization launch a space program to spread their species to other planets in other solar systems across the galaxy. “Spore” does only cover one galaxy, but the scale of this phase of the game is overwhelming. The Space Phase plays like a typical Space Sim, with the player mining Spice on various planets, trading it with other civilizations, and unlocking new tools and abilities for their spaceship by performing various actions to earn medals. The ultimate goal of the Space Phase is to reach the center of the galaxy, which is fiercely guarded by an overwhelming AI civilization.
Out of all these phases, I really only enjoyed the Creature and Space Phases. Creating and mutating creatures is fun, and exploring an increasingly large sphere of space is somewhat awe inspiring. However, the killer flaw that even these fun phases of the game possess is the mind-numbing amounts of repetition. There’s really not much for a Creature to do but befriend or extinct other species. And flying around from solar system to solar system trading Spice, befriending (or annihilating) new alien civilizations, and terraforming planets gets old after a while too.
Then there are the non-fun phases. Maybe I missed out on something, but both the Tribal and Civilization Phases are stupidly short. There are achievements for clearing these phases in less than an hour, and I got both of them on my first (and likely only) run through the game. While “Spore” promotes the idea that you can play in a variety of different ways in these phases, I never had the opportunity, as the AI is just too aggressive (even on Normal difficulty). I wanted to play “Spore” as a moderate, omnivorous society that loves its friends and kills its enemies. But every other Tribe attacked me within moments of appearing on the map, so I had to wipe them out. This ‘decision’ followed me to the Civilization Phase, where my militant, warlike creatures wiped me out twice before I was able to Zerg Rush them and take them out first (and destroy the world with ICBMs). Thankfully, the inadvertent militarism of my creatures didn’t follow them into the Space Phase, and I was able to play the game’s ending on my terms. It’s noteworthy that the various civilizations I met in Space all fell into a handful of Philosophies which dictated their behavior: Harmony, Prosperity, Chance, Science, Force, etc. My formerly-militant civilization was able to befriend EVERYONE… except Faith heads. These religious fanatics simply refused to deal peacefully with anyone who didn’t believe in ‘Spode.’ And since they didn’t want to be friends with me, I made sure to wipe them off the face of the galaxy, to prove just how useless their ‘god’ was. Life/Art, imitation, and all that.
Overall
“Spore” is ultimately like the Platte River in Nebraska: A mile wide, an inch deep, and intermittently clogged with trash. While I had limited fun with certain portions of “Spore” (specifically the Creature Phase and Space Phase) the rest of the game feels like a cobbled-together mish-mash of ill-fitting, underdeveloped components… just like its iconic creatures. The horrible PC Master Race controls, incredible shrinking UI, and lack of v-sync don’t help matters any. This is definitely not the god/evolution Sim I – or anyone else, apparently – was hoping for, but it’s still not a complete travesty.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
