Spore: PC Game Review

It was almost impossible for Spore to live up to the massive hype generated over the past several months by the EA PR machine. Will Wright, celebrated creator of the Sims and SimCity franchises, would've practically had to reinvent PC gaming for Spore to be all that EA wants you to think it is. I'm not going to keep you guessing--Spore is not any PC gaming revelation. What's more interesting to me is how far from greatness it falls.

Spore, in case you bought your first PC today and just happened to find my blog minutes after getting onto the net, attempts to take you through the development of an organism you create, from single cell through the conquest of space. About 90% of the game's pre-release hype focused on the creature editor, and it seems that roughly the same amount of development time was focused on this one part of the title as well. The "game", as it is, is broken into five stages depicting the development of your species: cell, creature, tribe, civilization, and space. Making one good game out of five little games doesn't sound like a good idea to me right off the bat, but to be fair my problems with Spore don't start there.

My problems with Spore start with the unwanted but necessary presence of the EA Download Manager, which has caused me more headaches than any other craplet in years. Spore is an online-enhanced game--the main gameplay is single-player, but you upload and download content to/from the online Spore community. To begin at the begining, you must be online just to install the game, which I find irritating in principle if not in practice. The tying of your serial number to your online Spore identity makes resale of the game a bit complicated, which is just what EA had in mind. You'd think that a game that is so reliant on online activity would be able to handle the downloading and uploading of game content natively, right? Bueller? No, for reasons I won't pretend to understand Spore requires the aid of the aforementioned craplet, the EA Download Manager. My first run-in with this rotten little app was on my wife's PC early last summer, when we downloaded the Spore Creature Creator and paid the $10 to unlock all the content. I had no problem getting everything downloaded on my PC, but the Download Manager had fits on my wife's PC, spewing error codes which EA's massively unhelpful customer service website translated into English to form the vaguest responses possible. Now that the full version of Spore is upon us, it's my PC that isn't getting along with the Download Manager. At least a dozen times in the past week plus my Internet connectivity has quietly withered and died. I haven't done any exhaustive tests to prove that it's the Download Manager, but it started happening right after I installed Spore. In fact, the first time I started Spore it told me that my PC appeared to be offline, and I exited the game to find myself unable to reach past my router. Each time I lose connectivity the solution is always the same: close down the Download Manager (which keeps running in the system tray after you quit Spore--WHY???), release & renew my IP address, and I'm back online. Bizarre coincidence? Maybe, but I'm gonna go on record and say the EA Download Manager sucks my balls.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: OK, as I was writing this post I lost my Internet connection, and the EA Download Manager is not currently running. I still blame it, though. I blame it's sheer presence on my machine. Worthless craplet. Why does it even need to be there? Goddamn thing.]

Cell Stage
Spore begins in Cell Stage. You choose to be either a carnivore or herbivore, and then your single-celled self finds itself in a tidal pool teeming with life. You eat red meaty bits if you're a carnivore, green leafy bits if you're a herbivore. You also try to avoid being eaten by larger organisms than yourself, but there's no real penalty if you wind up being something's lunch. You also try to find parts--and by that I mean creature parts--by finding (by blind chance, as far as I can tell) bits of the meteor you fell to planetside in and breaking them open. Carnivores can also find parts by eating other organisms. When you find a part (or parts) you want to incorporate into your creature, you hit the "find mate" button, and you quickly locate a member of your species who wants a date. A fertilized egg is produced, and you enter into the first round of the creature editor. You start off simply, with a 2-dimensional cell you can't really manipulate and a few parts you can attach to your creature. In this phase of the game your choices are fairly limited, but you can still find a variety of mouths, appendages to help you swim, and weapons/defenses to help your carnivores kill herbivores (and other carnivores) and your herbivores not get killed by carnivores. That's really all there is to this stage of the game. It's incredibly simple and not particularly challenging. It's also some of the most fun I've had playing Spore, thanks in no small part to the beautiful visuals. The colors are vibrant, and there's a great effect when your organism grows and becomes aware of a larger portion of its surroundings that still looks cool after 50 or so repetitions. After eating and growing enough you gain the ability to sprout legs and stumble onto land and into the next stage of the game. This first stage, by the way, probably won't take you more than 10 minutes unless you're seriously prowling for meteor bits to unlock as many creature parts as you can.

Creature Editor
When you evolve into a land creature you enter a more feature-rich version of the creature editor you used when adding parts to your cell. This time your view and manipulation of your creature is in 3D, and you are able to manipulate your creature's spine in many ways to shape this blob of digital clay into your fantasy creature. This is the one part of Spore that is an absolute success. The creature editor is very powerful yet quite simple to use, and you can get very creative with it. It's simple enough for my kids to use, but a quick look on YouTube will illustrate the extremes that an imaginative and dedicated designer can take the editor to. If you're like me and never really made anything much more impressive than a big wall with your Legos when you were a kid, you can always import other people's creatures (and plenty that Maxis provides) from the online community. I suck at design, so making this the carrot that wags the dog doesn't really do it for me, impressive though it may be. I still need a decent game to let me do something fun with the creatures I create. In the upcoming stage of the game, Spore comes as close as it ever does to meeting that need.

Creature Stage
Once you have redesigned your creation as a land beast, you enter Creature Stage. The primary activity here is meeting other creatures and interacting with them through either social or combat skills. (If you have uploaded creatures of your own design to the online Spore community, the game may even use your own designs to populate the world, which is undeniably cool.) As you meet other species (they usually congregate around campfires) you can attempt to befriend them, in which case you must impress them by demonstrating four skills: singing, dancing, charming, and posing. How well you can do each depends on what parts you have equiped your creature with. If the species you're interacting with is unimpressed, or if you're just feeling mean, you can choose to attack them instead, and again the parts you equip your creature with in the editor define your combat skills. Impress or defeat enough creatures and you move on to the next stage. While you're running around the continent interacting with different species you'll also be trying to find parts to add to your creature. You can find parts in carcasses that litter the landscape; they're frequently found near campfires, so as you find new species you'll also find parts. Much like the cell stage, when you want to try on some new parts (or change the look of your creature by adjusting its body type or color) you head back to your nest, click on your mate to produce an egg, and after a trip to the creature editor you are reborn as the next generation of your species. This is the phase where you'll become most attached to your creature, as it is here that you'll make the majority of your design choices--picking which parts you want and thereby molding both your creature's appearance and its skillset. Sadly, you never get to interact this closely with your creature again.

Tribe Stage
Tribe Stage is essentially an expanded version of the Creature Stage, minus the creature development. (They threw the baby out and kept the bathwater.) Instead of a simple bonfire you now have a small village, and can control a larger number of your creatures at once. You need to gather food for your tribe, so must task some of your villagers with hunting/fishing (for carnivores) or gathering fruit (for herbivores). Food also serves as the currency with which you buy buildings for your tribal village, which equip your villagers with tools to make them more capable at the three tasks they'll perform: hunting/gathering, socializing (conquering other tribes peacefully), and combat. Each creature can only hold one tool at a time, so you must choose their roles and equip them, then send them into a different building for another tool if thier role changes. The goal of this stage is to conquer the other tribes of your species in much the same way as you interacted with other species in the Creature Stage: either impressing them with your social skills or beating them into a miserable pulp in combat. Each time you conquer a tribe, your own tribe's maximum population increases. Conquer all the other tribes and you unite your species and progress to the next stage. In my opinion, Tribe Stage is where Spore really starts to stumble,and unfortunately it just snowballs from here. Tribe Stage expanded (slightly) on the social and combat activities undertaken in Creature Stage, but the development of your creature is pretty much over. This is a huge mistake, as the game essentially does away with its most compelling element in favor of simplistic real-time strategy gameplay. There's a little bit of micro-management involved, but the gameplay of this stage boils down to amassing an army and moving it in to overwhelm your enemy's base. A tank rush is still a tank rush, even if your tanks utilize singing and dancing as weapons. This stage is a bit of fun once or twice, boueyed by the cute graphics and the wonderful animation of the creatures, but it is too simple to have much replay value.

Civilization Stage
Civilization Stage is pretty much a rehash of Tribe Stage on a larger scale. Instead of buying tribal huts to give you tools and weapons you buy buildings to drive your economy. You can design each of these buildings with an editor, or you can import designs from the online community. Again, the creative possibilities are staggering, and you can find some fantastic designs online. You only have a choice of three buildings: houses, factories, and entertainment establishments, and as you buy them you place them on a grid within your city. The trick is to maximize production (factories connected to houses) while keeping your people happy (connecting entertainment to houses), and it's not a very difficult trick. Instead of creating creatures, your cities create vehicles (another chance to design or import). All cities can create land vehicles, and coastal cities can create naval vessels. Half-way through the stage you unlock the ability to create air units. You use your vehicles to capture spice geysers, which help fuel your economy. Depending on what sort of civilization you are (which is determined by how you chose to progress through the previous stages) you will attack other civilizations with your vehicles as well, using economic, religious, or military means. All three of them play out essentially the same: you design vehicles with "weapons" of one of the three types, build up a fleet, and send them to an opponent's city to do battle.

When Religion Attacks! The picture above shows a city being attacked by religious means: vehicles project a giant hologram which prosletyzes to the city under siege. Apart from the animation, conquering by economics, religion, or force works the same way: there's a give and take with each side taking damage, and the victor generally goes to the larger force. It's another simplistic real-time strategy game with charming graphics and a relatively empty head.

Space Stage
Spooooores...Iiiiiiin...SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!! Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Space Stage is by far the most complex stage of the game. From my comments so far you would think that would be a good thing, and it almost is. Unfortunately it's bogged down by repetitive gameplay, an annoying interface, and a drastically shifted timescale. In Space Stage you start off with one colony (the development of which is pretty much identical to your cities in the previous stage) and a spaceship to design/import. You then set out to win the game by conquering the other space empires, either by ingratiating yourself to them by doing them favors (usually courier-type missions), buying them out, or going the frickin' laser beams route. You also build up your own empire by creating and improving new colonies, but this part of the game almost seems like an afterthought, and the terraforming system, while unique and an interesting concept, becomes a nightmare of micromanagement and repetitive go-fer jobs. Fans of space strategy games will see this as a very shallow attempt at the genre. Part of the problem is the miserable interface. From galactic mode you can fly to a star, at which point you have to zoom in by scrolling your mouse wheel. You'll then be in solar system mode, where you can fly to an individual planet, at which point you must manually zoom in again. It doesn't sound like much, but it results in near-constant use of the mousewheel, which gets old fast. You also have to contend with the visually appealing but impractical 3D space map in galactic mode, which turns the simple task of finding and flying to your destination an obnoxious hassle. There are a bevy of selectable filters that are supposed to make your navigation of the map easier, but they really don't help much. To make matters worse, the "mission" filter that is suposed to highlight the route to your mission's destination seems to work only occasionally. It's irritating to have to spend minutes at a time mousing over various stars on the map (which don't have labels for their names--you can only see their names by mousing) looking for a particular star, but even worse when the clock is ticking away on a timed mission when you're doing so. It's a poor interface, and that fact should've been readilly apparent in beta testing. My other issue with the Space Stage, which is the straw that busted this camel's hump, is the timeframe. Like in the other stages, there is a progress bar at the bottom of the screen that shows you how much further you have until you reach the end of the stage. After nearly three hours of exploring the galaxy, expanding my empire, and performing dozens of missions for other empires, I had progressed less than 20% through the stage. Maybe I'm missing something fundamental about the stage, but at this rate it simply isn't enough fun for me to continue. The number of hours I would have to put into the game doing repetitive, less-than-compelling tasks just isn't worth it. I have brought two organisms from their single-celled origins to the emptiness of space, and I am more or less abandoning them there, because at that point the time vs. reward ratio becomes horribly skewed.

The problem with Spore, technical buffoonery with the EA Download Manager aside, is that it puts forth a great and compelling concept--the design of a spceies--and then fails to deliver much of a game to give it legs. I'm not denying that the creature creator (and by extension the editor you use to design buildings and vehicles) is a masterpiece--it's a fantastic piece of software that pulls off a rare balancing act by being both simple to use and powerful enough to allow people's creativity to run rampant. Where Spore fails is in creating an equally compelling game to use the little buggers in. Like I mentioned previously, after the second of Spore's five stages you pretty much lose that personal relationship you have with your creation, as your development of the creature effectively ends with the Creature Stage. Sure, you can put clothes on them in the next two stages, but if that's your thing there are plenty of free web sites that will let you do that with digital dolls. Honestly, I get the impression that nobody really tried that hard to make Spore into a good game, as if the design team was too tired after crafting the creature editor. The editor was released for free in advance of the game (part of that enormous EA hype machine), and you can spend $10 to unlock all the parts and paint schemes, essentially giving you the best part of this experience for a sawbuck. Casual gamers may find some things to like in Spore, but for serious gamers the high-gloss Maxis production values can only temporarilly distract from the fact that Spore is a watered-down real-time strategy game at best, and holds little replay value.

"I've got all the little details worked out. Now if we can just come up with the main points, we've got something." --Woody Allen, "Love & Death"