Spore Guest Review

This game has been out for awhile, and the reason why I’m writing this so late is because I was feeling lazy this past month…so anyways, on with the subject at hand…

By Guneden

As most people have known by now, Spore is a pc game that allows the player to create a species from a cell and lead their creation to eventual galactic domination. While the premise is a first and interesting, the execution is poorly done unfortunately. After choosing a planet to start on, you start with a single cell, and you direct the cell to eat various pieces of meat or veggies, while evading larger enemies or killing other species of cells. This part is not too bad, as it will only last around 10 minutes or so before you advance to the next stage. The next stage, which I found the most entertaining, was the creature stage, where you go on land and start making your creature with the various pieces of parts lying around the map. Apparently it is next to useless to befriend other species as you will want to kill them later anyways for experience and parts.

WARNING! Any attempt to proceed further in the game will result in major disappointment, time wasting, and conversion to the SSF (Spore Sucks Faction).

The next steps are the tribe and city stages, which are awfully boring since the creators kind of messed up the difficulty level. As long as you equip every one of your tribe members with spears or axes, you will raze the enemy village in one try 100% of the time. For the city stage, since everyone else starts 2-3 minutes later than your city, all you need to do is grab as much geysers as possible (around 3-4), which will enable you to build a large army at the click of a button and wipe out your enemies with ease.

The space stage is probably the longest one as it is the last, and covers the entire galaxy which consists of thousands of solar systems. The objective- reach the center of the galaxy. Unlike the creature stage, it is better to befriend as many empires as possible since they each sell different items at lower prices than your own empire. The beginning of this stage might be quite annoying due to the two hostile empires right next to your home planet. However, if you can take them both down, the rest should be a breeze. Most empires can be allied with by giving $100,000 to them each and just choosing the ally option.
Planet Buster FTW!
To reach the center of the galaxy, one must have at least: lv 4 interstellar drive, around 20 mega health packs and 10 mega energy packs. These are required to survive constant attack from the Grox empire, which spans most of the area around the center of the galaxy. All your efforts will be rewarded with the Staff of Life, which terraforms any planet to lv 3, and a slightly amusing cutscene. Unfortunately, getting back to your home planet is another matter. Either you rush past the Grox again, with less healing items than when you first went in, or you eliminate the Grox. Mind you, they are quite tough, and can destroy your spaceship in seconds even with max life boost. Then again, by this time you would probably have run out of patience and just quit the game altogether.

One might ask why, and the answer is simple. It’s boring. I don’t think anyone enjoys controlling only ONE ship and fly around doing simple things with just clicks when all your enemies have a whole fleet after you. Also, there is nothing new to do after awhile. Running around collecting and selling spice isn’t exactly fun, as well as clicking targets to destroy them. Probably the only redeeming factor is the ability to customize your own planets and ships, but how fun can it possibly be to put down random mountains and rivers? Unfortunately Spore does not live up to its Sims predecessors, and I doubt the online gameplay will add any value to it.
I will summarize my opinions in the words of Mithril- “Spore Sucks…That is all”.