Developer Will Wright has a habit of making ambitious games that appeal to video game regulars and newbies alike ("SimCity," "The Sims"). His latest, "Spore" - intended to be a "Sim-everything" game - doesn't quite live up to the years-long hype. However, it's still a solid game anyone with a remote interest in its intriguing premise should check out.
At the beginning, you create a simple, single-celled organism, either a herbivore or carnivore, and swim around eating bits of plants or meat. Amusing at first, the stage gets better as your creature grows and deals with bigger predators (though there's no penalty for death). This is a great hook to immediately entertain the player without too much focus on heavy customization. In about 20 minutes - a bit too soon for repetition to sink in - your creature grows legs and hops on land for the next stage.
That stage will likely be the big crowd-pleaser of "Spore." You roam around the land, either fighting rival species' nests or making friends with them, while collecting new "parts" to add to your own creature. Combat is simple point-and-click RPG style, with some special abilities mixed in.
The Spore Creature Creator, released before the game itself came out, deserves special mention. A simple editor allows you to shape your creature like a clay model. Most creature parts affect gameplay, like making your creature faster, stronger or giving it a new behavior useful for making friends with other species.
As you move on to the third stage, your creatures become a tribe, out to conquer or ally with rival tribes. It's an extremely limited real-time strategy game, and it's the most problematic of all the stages. You have to gather food to create units and a few buildings, but the resource management is so one-dimensional that it becomes nothing more than a chore. Combat is merely telling your units to kill identical enemies with little real strategy involved. Luckily, you can complete this stage in about an hour.
The civilization stage, a more complex expansion of the third, plays much better. Though there are only a few types of buildings and units, increasing the number of units the player can build results in a much more entertaining strategy game. The simplicity of the game play probably won't appeal to serious RTS fans, but for more casual gamers it should be great fun without being too overwhelming.
In the final stage, you are a galactic conqueror in a massive universe. You control a custom-designed spaceship while exploring the universe, making friendly or unfriendly contact with different empires, establishing colonies, and taking on different missions. This is the deepest stage of "Spore," and feels like an entire game unto itself. Unlike the previous stages, this one isn't meant to be finished in an hour. The missions are either fairly simple delivery missions or brief skirmishes with enemy spaceships. The combat in this stage, although still simple point-and-click, is pretty exciting. This is "Spore" at its best.
Technically, "Spore" rejects modern, highly detailed graphics that only monster PC's could generate for simple art design that runs fine on a Macbook. The environments seem otherworldly, but friendly and reminiscent of "World of Warcraft." The colorful, cartoon-style graphics are so well done that even the most hardcore gamers won't mind the relative lack of technical detail.
You can reach this writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
