I’ll have a better review up in a day or two when I have played through more of the Galactic Conquest game, but basically, here’s what I thought of it.
The game is split into a bunch of stages, most of which are very short. You aren’t in the cell stage for more than half an hour — in fact, it’s really hard to slow things down much. I found it difficult as a herbivorous single-celled animal to find new parts, since I couldn’t kill other creatures for theirs.
You advance to the land creature stage after several evolutions with whatever parts you managed to find swimming in the primordial muck. Unless you always intended for your creatures to look like paramecium with legs, you’ll have to go looking for parts by killing things or waiting for other creatures to kill things and then go rooting around in the bones, depending on where you fall in the meat/plant eater spectrum.
If you’re a herbivore — which definitely ends up being the harder path in the creature stage — you can only advance by making friends with other animals, which means… challenging them to a dance-off.
No, really.
You are judged on your ability to sing, dance, look cute (charm), and pose. The parts you choose in the creature creator influence your ability to tear it up on the savannah dance floor. If you’re really good, you can get some creatures to join your pack, which gives hungry carnivores someone other than you to chew on when Step Up 4: Darwin U reaches its inevitable, disastrous conclusion.
You’ll probably just want to skip having to randomly build your creature from found parts and just use the full creator with all the parts. This leaves you without the Siren Song ability, which calms creatures and increases their receptiveness to your breakdancing.
Next up is tribal. Make your critters stand upright, and give them hands. This and the next few stages are real-time strategy stages. You can either kill all the other tribes, make peace with them, or kill some, ally with some. It’s a VERY simple RTS and goes by quickly. You can slow it down by doing side quests like taming wild animals (which gives an achievement), but there’s little point. How you play this stage sets up the next stage, a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) Civilization-like game of worldwide conquest. If you killed every other tribe, you become a militaristic nation. I believe peaceful tribes become religious nations, but I’m not sure.
The vehicles you design in the Civilization will reflect your strategy in the Tribal stage. And the means with which you conquer other cities determine what you can do with them. I defeated half the enemy cities through military means (including one city I nuked because I was getting bored), and then made an alliance with the remaining superpower, and that was that.
It took about four hours to go from a cell swimming in goo to my first spaceship.
After that, the game started its real phase.
Spore is a galactic civilization game. Everything else is just a prologue to it. The first alien civilization I encountered was using my mechs (my land vehicles are giant cat mechs called Ratters — look it up on Sporepedia under tipadaknife) and my Flappers (a steampunk aircraft that looks like a duck swimming through the air). So I thought that was rude of them. I am in the process of conquering them now through economic means.
Is it fun? Well, it’s like any decent 4X game — it’s always just one more turn. Plus, you can design new vehicles and buildings for every new colony, so you’re in the vehicle and building creator all the time.
Spore is really just two games. One is the best introductory 3D modeling program I have ever seen, with support for sharing that is seamless and automatic — there were almost 8 million player created creatures, vehicles and buildings in the Sporepedia this morning. I was enjoying building my new colonies with vehicles and buildings way more twisted than anything I could come up with.
The second game is the Galactic Civilization game. If you like GalCiv or Master of Orion 2 or others of the genre, you will likely want to rush through all the other stuff to get to it. Or just play GalCiv. Well, Spore is somewhat different. You go from place to place and get quests, like kill five floozles on this planet, or investigate strange signals from that system, or mine this much spice and sell it to them over there. There’s also collection quests and a terraforming mini game.
The other stages go by so fast, you’ll miss them if you blink. Granted, I was playing on Easy.
It’s a decent game. For the time they spent, I would have liked to have spent more time in the tribal, RTS phase. Even the strongest opponents fell for the simplest trick — kill an enemy villager with spears, then run back to the home village and pick off enemy villagers as they follow you to retaliate. Leaving the home village so that enemies would send in their villagers to steal your food, and then rush in and burninate their less protected village also worked well.
17 thoughts on “Spore: Short, short impressions”
Comments are closed.
In the space phase of the game are you actually fighting other species? If the majority of Spore takes place at this phase I hope it at least has some of the basic features of Master of Orion. Namely can you design ships and fight wars with other races?
You can choose to fight other species, but it isn’t giant fleets of space ships. At least, not yet. I only have the one ship I made at the end of the Civilization phase. If it ever DOES come to that, I’ll go back to playing Sins of the Solar Empire, where fleets can get truly massive.
But yeah, it’s no MoO. It’s a single player RPG in space sim clothing.
@Relmstein: Yes, and yes. You can be a pacifist, an explorer, a merchant, or a dominant empire like the Borg should you choose to do so. The choice is yours, quite simply. Though the choices you’ve made throughout your creatures’ evolution determine just how good you might be at the military side of the Space stage. For example, if I spent the previous 4 stages being nice and working towards peace with other species and cultures, then in the Space stage my people will be genetically predisposed towards being peaceful space explorers.
However, if I spent the entirety of my evolution killing everything I could, in the space stage I’d be a force to be reckoned with. And fear not, there’s a middle ground too. No matter your predisposition, the choice of how you proceed in space is ultimately yours. And the Space stage is undoubtedly the deepest portion of the game.
@Tipa: I played on easy too… almost made it seem too easy. Going to try normal after I’ve spent some time in Space.
I guess I was hoping for fleets of spaceships with weird designs that reflected the evolutionary choices which produced your species. Still it sounds like a interesting game and I’ll have to pick it up eventually. I’m not so keen on only being able to install it 3 times per DVD though. Think I’ll just wait until they remove that piece of DRM.
Well, you will see groups of ships all from differently evolved creatures’ designs. Fleets? Not sure, the most I’ve seen were 3 or 4, but I only got to play the space game for about 45 minutes so far. In that time, I’ve only controlled myself, but fought many.
3 races so far discovered, all different looks, as designed by Maxis (one of them) and players (the other 2). I imagine there are hundreds more to discover and interact with.
Nice review between here and JoBildo I will have to get this game. Thanks a ton for a great article
I’ve spent a few days with the game and I found all the pre-space phases to be a joy. If you play the same style again and again its not that exciting. The Civ phase was a little dull for me, maybe because my race was 100% militaristic from its single cell, and I guess thats why my Civ period was just all out world war…
After spending a few hours in the space phase I decided to try a more friendly herbivore creature from the very beginning. Its not really “harder” to play friendly/diplomatic it just takes much more patience. Some races won’t be impressed by your display, and its just easier to eat them instead of coming back after you’ve evolved. That being said, being forced to act a certain way just doesn’t work for me. Its like playing an RPG, shooting for 100% good or 100% evil makes the game dull. I tend to to just go with the flow and see where I end up.
From what I can gather, the most interesting path is the omnivore creature with ‘adaptable’ tendencies. You can only get omnivore status by finding the green cell creature with the omnivore mosquito-like mouth part on about the 3rd level of the cell phase, kill him, get his part, and then make sure you eat an equal-ish amount of meat and vegetation during the cell phase. This is an interesting path to take because you can make a creature that not only suitable for eating plants and befriending other species but also able eat other species when they need to defend themselves.
On my current game, I started up omnivores, and tried to maintain balance between the neighbors I killed and neighbors I befriended. I basically ate who was weaker than me, and befriended (and recruited) whoever was stronger than me–maybe the most “intelligent” methodology? Its made for the most interesting game so far for me, but I would recommend everybody trying all the choices (carebear, warmonger or mixed) at least once, because they are all very quite different styles of play.
The real payoff to this game is when you’ve been playing for several hours and you realize that yes, that little creature you so nonchalantly sculpted and watched scamper away from its nest is now driving around tanks, building cities and developing inter-stellar travel. Its the same little character you designed, adapted to all these different situations and plugged into these different game genres and I didn’t have to crack open a manual or hardly read any tutorials at all, just got clicking and watched all the magic happen. Its gotta be the most epic casual game ever made I know that much.
@Capt. Angry:
I actually made an omnivore simply by giving my Cell 2 mouths. One was an herbivore’s mouth, and one was a carnivore’s mouth. Both near the nose of the thing and it worked flawlessly.
Re: Two Mouths
If that works, I suppose that is an interesting way to do it. I remember I tried starting with carnivore mouth and changing it halfway through and that didn’t work for me, still gave me carnivore in the end, I thought maybe it depended on moving to phase 2 with the omnivore mouth ON your creature, but I guess it all just depends on what you eat.
I forgot to mention that, strangely enough, my normally flawlessly operating PC has started BSOD-crash-rebooting while I’m playing spore. I played the game for a few hours Saturday night without a problem, then Sunday out of the blue it crashed the PC, and now every time I play it after a couple hours it crashes. I have to save my game constantly. You know how frustrating it is to be halfway through the tribal stage with a great looking critter and then suddenly get bumped back to the creature phase? Designing a creature twice to look exactly the same in Spore–pretty much impossible.
I googled the error recovery message and most of what I read points to memory or some other hardware problem. Just strange that a PC that I normally play WoW or AoC or Civ 4 for 12+ hours straight would suddenly die after a few hours of Spore… it makes me suspect the game client instead.
@Capt Angry — My cell critter I called Diver, and so I named the land critter it evolved into Driver, but it’s a cat-like creature with a rat snout, black fur and indigo stripes. Now, in space, it wears a helmet and armor and insignia and yells at me from the planets I orbit… And it is kinda neat. Looks totally like its own critter, hard to believe I brought it to life.
Yep, that’s what I meant about that last paragraph. I think Spore is pretty darn amazing, but if you take the creature creation-evolution for granted it becomes pretty average. What you wrote is accurate… while the game has many entertaining aspects, the creature/vehicle/building creation and evolution is probably more than half of the fun, even put up against all 5 other gameplay phases.
@Captain Angry
Hmm, any possibility that SecuRom on Spore is causing your computer to crash? I heard it seems to introduce a bad case of the gremlins to a lot of computers.
You can definately play an aggressive herbivore species, incidentally. You simply cant eat your prey.
@Relmstein
Not sure, I did a scan disc and ran memtest86 for about 4-5 hours while I was at work. Last night I ran it in a window so I could keep an eye on some temperature diagnostics in the background, and it never crashed so maybe I fixed it, or maybe it wont crash as long as I play it in a window… fine by me!
Update: Turns out it was SecuROM that was making my PC freak out. I patched it with a pirate EXE circumventing the protection and it hasn’t crashed since then.
lol… once again, the pirates have the best version of the game. The paying customers get the crap. I haven’t had any problems with SecureROM, but if I do, I guarantee I will be grabbing a torrent. I have a legal right, as a paying customer, to a copy of the game that works.
And so do you.