Spore is a lousy game about evolution,
and a clever game about life out in the stars. The evolution comes first: You
build a creature from a single cell to a world-dominating species, tweaking its
DNA and adjusting its culture until you're commanding the spitting
hammer-tailed lizard thing of your dreams. The first four stages of the game
are short and disjointed, and as far as the science, Spore keeps ducking hard questions
by changing the subject. Anyone hoping to watch the survival of the fittest may
puzzle over the whole "singing and dancing" thing.
But these stages are really just a personality
test for stage five, where you launch into space—and into a real-time
strategy game that pits you against randomly generated galactic empires. The
skills you picked up on your home planet—diplomacy, militancy,
evangelical fervor—give you certain advantages as you decide whether to
work with or eviscerate your neighbors, but survival depends entirely on how
you use a few basic strategies. Meanwhile, you'll gawk over creatures created
by your fellow players, and you can also build your colonies with user-made
houses and factories. But none of the content offers game-changing advantages.
You can admire all the pretty slug-cows and their mushroom-shaped domiciles,
but they're mostly interesting for their own sake, not because they affect the
task at hand.
Once you settle into the flow of the game, the
creative possibilities expand just as the actual gameplay becomes limiting. The
user-generated content could have added meaningful complexity—what if you
could trade user-generated goods, instead of the game's generic "spice"?† But instead, it never gets past a "gee
whiz" factor. Surveying an entire galaxy, full of content from the entire
world, makes you glimpse the possibilities of the universe. But having evolved
from survival to self-actualization, you'll have nothing left to do but admire
it.
Beyond
the game: While
the style is often cute and jokey to a fault, the vividly colored worlds and
dramatic terraforming effects make up for it.
Worth playing for: Surprises litter each stage,
like the epic-sized cousins of your creations, or the Sim City-descended urban-planning
challenge.
Frustration
sets in when: The
manual is too skimpy for such a complex game and such a wonky interface.
Final
judgment: One
awe-striking, genre-changing vision would've been enough.