I Really Hope This Isn’t How God Sees It: A Spore Review

In the lead-up to the much anticipated release of Spore, I wondered to myself why the only gameplay demos we saw were of the cell and creature stage. I should have seen it coming.

Sure, the early part’s fun, with very simple and user-friendly kill-or-be-killed mechanics. But why didn’t I see clips from the much-lauded Space stage?

When you finally reach it, Space seems great—it’s very bright and very shiny; there’s plenty more to do, see and explore in comparison to the previous chapters. But that comparison should hint to the fact that there’s just not much of a game here.

As leader of my creatures (the Varnish, hailing from planet Oak Furniture) I must explore, colonize, terraform, wage war and make alliances.

And that’s fine, until you’re a few hours in and small, repetitive annoyances start building up.

Why, in Spode’s name, does the Omnipotent commander of the Varnish fleet, still have to pick up the damned Spice? We can fly through black holes and heat up a dead planet until it blooms into life, but haven’t wrapped our collective mind around the concept of a cargo ship?

Why does my home planet price gouge me to levels that would make an oil executive blush, but give me free ships when I break one?

Why do I have to stop what I’m doing to save my allies from ecological disaster, but no one can spare a laser to cull my diseased herds?

And forcing an end goal on me—getting to the center of the universe and “dealing” with the Grox somehow—has the effect of making me want to stop. (The Grox- you can’t live with them, and I certainly can’t spend a week straight mindlessly blowing up hundreds of planets just to live without them.)

It’s not engaging enough to make me want to try.

When my home planet calls me up, demanding that I destroy the Grox, I’m left with two thoughts: “Why?” followed quickly by, “Piss off.”

Of course, by this point, they’ve already declared war on me, so I might as well throw in the towel and get to killing. It’s not like it’s hard, per se… Except that there are somewhere near 1,000 Grox-controlled planets.

And as I zoom out enough to witness the sea of stars between me and my endpoint, the center, my mind is made up. Not gonna happen.

It’s simply not fun enough to make me want to keep going. There are plenty of ways they could have improved it, that would have made it more exciting: for example, if I could automate Spice trading, so it doesn’t feel like an idiotic chore; or if there was some noticeable benefit to terraforming and colonization, other than creating more opportunities for natural disasters, pirates, and targets for my enemies. If there were more tools to make self-guided play entertaining, I could spend months in a private war on Spode himself, happily a’sploding each and every race of his believers.

The longer I play, the more I wish I was playing something else entirely. Spore’s final product feels lacking, even after years of development.

The best parts of the game are undoubtedly the Creature and Space stages. But that doesn’t bode well for the over-all product, considering Maxis gave out free downloads of the Creature Creator, and the Space stage game plays like a watery copy of other space games.

In the final analysis, Spore only held my attention for about a week before I was right back in my sandbox with the Sims 2.

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But a last and private note to my creations:

I’m sorry, dear Varnish, that your eyes ever did encompass the sky. That you carried the dream of slipping the surly bonds of planet Oak Furniture, to touch the face of Spode. Were I a more merciful master to you, I would have kept you safe in the Civilization stage- at least until another space-faring race decided to blow you up only because they wanted to possess the rock you live on (as we frequently did.)

I’m sorry there is nothing in the Spore gameplay that makes me want to keep going for you guys. I’m sorry it lacks a simple game mechanic to handle trading spice. That I, your creator, have to constantly visit you and ferry your fetid goods across the stars for meager profit. I’m sorry that this game design has locked you into shocking stupidity that prevents you from building a second ship and creating anything other than colored spice to sell.

All grown up! I was so proud...

If it feels like I’m abandoning you now, my sweet pink and deadly flying dinosaurs, know that you will live on. In the Sporepedia, to be precise, under the name KleenKiller. Take solace in the hope that someone might find you, download you, and let you live again—perhaps, as I never did.

With love and hope for changes in Spore 2,

<3The Omnipotent