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Spore

Civilization Stage

As you evolve from a tribe to a proper nation, you are thrown with a task of designing some new bits for your species. Initially you are asked to design a land-based vehicle and central building for your city. The editor for buildings and vehicles is similar to the creature editor, and allows you to fully customize the look of your civilization. You can optionally pick from a huge number of existing buildings and vehicles included with the game, or if you are logged to the online service, choose one that has been designed by another players. While creatures tend to be very personal and something you truly want to make yourself, vehicles and buildings are a great way to demonstrate how the online sharing aspect of Spore works.

We shall build a.... city!

Designing a suitable palace for our glorious leader.

You then choose how you prefer to "unite" your home planet. The obvious choice is through conquest, destorying all competing nations through military superiority. Religious civilizations can opt to do that non-violently by converting competiting cities through propaganda. Economic civilizations can do the through trade, effectively buying out the whole planet. The currency in this stage is spice, initially mined from plumes that spot the landscape.

While the civilization stage plays like a little RTS cousin of Civilization, it's again simplified to the point where there is almost no point. Cities can hold three different buildings and some defensive turrets, and you just have to build a working mix of houses (adds to your unit cap), factories (adds to your spice production, creates unhappiness) and entertainment (adds happiness). Once you figure out the rudimentary strategy needed to build up cities, the game turns into a quick wipeout of the rest of the planet. You can design and build your own land, sea and air units, but it's all mostly cosmetics. Some parts modify the statistics of your units, but it's all very simple and doesn't really matter in the battlefield.

Once you have overrun the planet - either through military, religious or economic means - the UFO editor opens up and you get to design your very own universe-dominating spacecraft. Sadly at this point the last pretenses that your design actually matters are thrown overboard as the spacecraft design is purely for show. No matter what components you add in, every spacecraft has identical initial performance, and the only things that matter are the additional weapons and abilities you add in during the space stage, and those do not influence the appearance of your spacecraft in any way.

Space Stage

Space, the final frontier... you start with your home planet, now fully under your own control, and the game opens up to galactic scale. You can actually zoom all the way from one guy doing his business on your planet to a view of the whole galaxy. Very impressive. There is a loading pause when you move from planetary view to solar system view, but on high end systems it's almost seamless. A whole galaxy as a playground!

Unfortunately the playground is already inhabitated by other space-faring species, and even if getting this far through war is easy, you are again at the bottom of the food chain and things get slightly more complicated. To expand your empire, you have to either colonize new worlds, trade with existing colonies until they are ripe for an economic buyout, or expand through warfare. In practice you have to mix strategies - the only way to keep others from stomping your upstart civilization is to keep them happy by trade and by running errands for them. These errands include things like fetching specific artifacts, creatures or plants from specific star systems. Main way to fund your activities is through trade of spice, produced by your planets. While earlier stages allowed you to purchase things directly with your spice, in space stage you must personally pick up and deliver loads of spice between worlds to generate income.

Colonization is probably the most interesting bit in this stage of the game. You start with a colony module, some appropriate terraforming modules and a selection of plants and animals abducted from other worlds, and head out to a good candidate world that orbits a star at a good distance. Then you put down your initial colony and start adjusting the temperature and atmosphere by using one-shot terraforming devices. Once the planet hits "T1" habitability, you can populate it with three different species of plants and animals. In order to unlock additional city spots you have to continue terraforming and importing species of plants and animals until the ecosystem is complete and the planet has reached "T3" stage of habitability.

Unfortunately all this fairly interesting gameplay is hampered by the crappy combat mechanics. Sooner or later you either encounter a species that refuses to cooperate and declares a war, or you run across Grox, the ultimate baddies of the galaxy, bent on blasting everything to bits. Either way, you will be constantly attacked at your colonies. As the available defenses you can build to your colonies are very weak, the only way to keep your colonies safe is to babysit them manually with the only ship at your disposal - your own.

Due to this, the interesting gameplay of completing quests for other species, terraforming worlds and exploring the universe for hidden artifacts is constantly being interrupted by invasions. Between ferrying spice around to fund your operation and defending your holdings, there is precious little time to actually do anything else. Combat being just simple "click click click... boom" or the inability to build spaceships to protect your colonies beyond the one you fly yourself doesn't exactly help.

Scouting out the competition...

Alien abductions - Spore style.

At times the space stage of Spore is like a dream - highly detailed and huge sandbox to play in, but it's all messed up by simplified gameplay elements and the constant alerts to go and defend this and that. To sum it up, the space stage is screaming for a patch to make it play better. Space stage is also highly unstable - I've personally seen the game crash at least half dozen times, and since there is no auto-save a crash can be very frustrating. Save early, save often.

The ultimate goal of it all is to build up until you again fill up a "colony bar" that indicates the size of your empire, and ultimately to visit the center of the galaxy. There is also the sub-goal of collecting badges awarded for doing all the different things available to you. You can also improve your ship and terraforming tools along the way and unlock a series of achievements.

The space stage has many cute little features such as the ability to help existing pre-spaceflight species along, waging war through terraforming to kill off existing species or the ability to go all out with planet-busting mega-bombs. Yet as a whole the gameplay doesn't hold together. It's just not properly polished and balanced to be fun in the long run. If only someone could take the engine and do a proper hardcore 4X-game. It's just so hard to look at something like Galactic Civilizations II after all the shiny bits in Spore, yet the gameplay of Spore is frustratingly paper-thin for those of us who grew up playing proper galactic conquest games.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: From Cell to TribePage 3: To Infinity and Beyond...Page 4: Visuals, DRM issuesPage 5: Summary and Scores

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