SPORE product reviews

When my brother and I saw the promos and trailers for Spore, nearly a year in advance, we were practically salivating at the possibilities. It just sounded so cool. Unfortunately, with such high hopes, Spore couldn't really help but disappoint.

The infinte possibilities for creature design, building design and such was a cool idea, but once you've made your brilliant creations, you really want to do something cool with them. The actual game stages I found rather repetetive after a while. Especially later on, once your creatures become sentient, the civilization phase is like an over simplified version of Sid Miers Civilization, then once you get to the Space Stage, you realize there isn't really anything to do. Terraforming planets is fun to begin with, but when you play 'nice' and form wide reaching alliances, you are 'rewarded' by a whole bunch of whiny planets constantly needing your personal attention to 'save' them from diseased animals and pirate attacks - when you are literally on the other side of the galaxy!!

Seriously! This is the point where I realized I had better things to do with my life. To be fair, Spore is a whole new concept, a pioneer into evolving gameplay and the ability for user creation in-game. I love the 'idea' of Spore and I'm excited to see where Maxis will take these new possibilities in future games. I hope that they include, with their new games, a security system that doesn't kill your game completely after 5 computer changes though.

A fantastic concept for a game, essentially unlimited creative licence to do whatever you like and yet limited to certian building blocks so that you're not smothered with too many choices.

All five stages of SPORE are well thought out and good fun to play, if a little simplistic at times, however the space stage seems like it needed some in depth user testing, its great to a point but some of the features are just plain annoying. The alliances just end up being a drag as your allies do pratically nothing for you except ask you to save them from eco disasters when your halfway across the galaxy (very often i might add).
The ability to leave your ship as a hologram was quite the let down as well.. It requires a lot of effort to get and yet its just a large transparent version of your creature that moves really slowly, it would have been much better if it was just an ability to leave your ship and run around like in the creature stage.

On the whole it's definitly worth a play, creating creatures both serious and insane is always entertaining and there is almost infinite replayability even if you only enjoy a few of the stages, and theres a healthy dose of rewards and bonuses to get along the way.