What is Spore? Spore is an evolutionary park, where all the players have a few things to play with; the slide, a swing set, jungle gym, and of course the sand box. While some kids will undoubtedly run straight into one of the active activities, others will head for the sand box and create stuff. That is Spore, a collaborative playground where players have their choice of what to do.

The journey from single-celled organism to space-faring society is going through that full list of active things to play on, while creating everything from the organisms to buildings to theme songs for cities is, for the most part, like playing The Sims. Which is to be expected.

Yet this five-in-one game is really just two games in one: the creation of different organisms and buildings and vehicles, and the development of said organisms. Depending on personal preference, one or both of these will be fun. However, because Spore tries to do so very much, it ends up lacking. Maxis’ search for realism has dug a hole that they cannot climb out of. Not yet, anyways.

 

 

Beginning as a single celled organism, Spore plays very much like flOw, where players must maneuver their creatures to eat either other swimming organisms or plants. From that moment, players are also forced to decide whether their creatures will be carnivores, omnivores or herbivores, something that comes too quickly. When I realized that my diet cannot be changed later on, it was too late for me to stop eating meat and get some veggies in my diet, and the only way to fix it would be to start over.

This section is fairly easy, and takes little more than half an hour to complete. So building the proper creature is of dire importance. If the creature doesn’t have the right mouth, the right protection of spikes or poison-excreting sacks or even the right fins, you’re fish food. The simple list of features for the Creature Creator of single celled organisms has only a few things to change, but they’re important ones. Every part has a purpose and is used to its utmost.

 

 

Completing this stage of creature growth leads to complications. Getting on land means making a creature that follows the traits made in the previous stage, and that’s all. The Creature Creator becomes more robust, with different levels of strength, speed, attack and abilities for each. In fact, in this stage the Creature Creator is at its best, giving a huge number of options that all will have different reactions to the encounters players will have.

Yet even in this stage the Creature Creator is flawed. Players aren’t rewarded for making a creature that has more desirable traits, such as being extremely tall or large. Size doesn’t matter in the slightest. Unless the body part attached to the creature has some written advantage, it is purely aesthetic. Tall creatures cannot step on shorter ones, nor will they be stronger or more powerful in any way. The determining factors of a strong creature rely solely on the few “power parts” that are supplied, which kills any creativity players may have.