The latest game by Maxis, the people that brought you the Sims, is an open-ended game where players can create a being that starts off as a few cells and quickly evolves into a galaxy-colonising empire.
This simulation game allows you to create everything in your own world from the eyes on your little cellular creation, to the lasers on your spacecraft. Players can even share their creations with other players through the Sporepedia, an online database of Spore creations that have been uploaded.
Spore consists of phases that work like simple mini-games linked together.
At the cell stage, Spore plays out like Pac-Man with upgrades, but then turns into a platform-style game in the creature stage. The next two stages — tribal and civilisation phase — play like a simple RTS (teal-time strategy — e.g. Warcraft), where you have to build a nation that overpowers other creatures. The evolutionary path then ends with a space-trading-style game with optional paths for galactic domination. The final phase is the longest and can carry on for months as the number of planets to explore exceeds fifty thousand.
The aim of the game is to survive and evolve — this means living in a world with creatures ranging from friendly little frog-like creatures that try to ally and trade their way to dominance, to blood-thirsty, trigger-happy beasts that won’t hesitate to kill anything that moves.
There are many ways to interact with other creatures throughout the evolution, ranging from economics and religious propaganda to war.
The amazing thing about this is that the entire progression of your creature is altered by the way you behave — meaning, if you kill other creatures earlier on in the game, more war-orientated options and upgrades become available.
The choices you make change the way other creatures react towards you, so when you kill a species off, other species will either flee or retaliate, depending on the severity of your own attack. Even the music changes from being relaxed and soothing to a more upbeat tribal drum melody to accompany the gameplay style.
The game is layered with options to vary and customise your creatures, vehicles, buildings, cities and even whole planets. This is all achieved with stunning simplicity — the basic shapes, provided as templates for your creations, are vast and different and can be stretched, widened, shortened, moulded and combined to create almost anything.
However, if you are not feeling creative you can always use a Maxis-made creation or download another player’s content.
For those that have followed the hype on this title for the past few months, I am sorry to say that the multiplayer is nothing more than a content-trading feature.
Another disappointment is that the way that game works is rather simple and will probably appeal to less action-orientated gamers.
However, the vast universes, customisation and different gameplay variations make Spore an entertaining and long-lasting game that will have you testing different ways to play for a few weeks, or even months, on end.