Going into Spore I didn't really have many expectations. I watched the 10 minute Will Wright walkthrough years ago and I was quite impressed. From what I remember it hasn’t changed much.
I start the game and I chose to use the preset Species design it gave me, which I named “Neil Patrick Harris”. I’m quickly thrown into a 2d ocean as a bacteria and it’s my duty to eat green things (for herbivores) or meat particles for carnivores. Neil is a herbivore. The graphics in this area are quite stunning. The water is full of distortion and currents, you can see giant (comparatively) species slowly drifting below you. It’s quite breathtaking. You explore the area simply with your mouse to collect food and parts for your spore which are usually found in bits of rock. You’re also competing with many other species, big and small they surround you and chase you to the food. Some will attack you. The threats all around you made me feel stressed like I really was in a survival of the fittest. As you collect food you get chances to evolve your creature a little, you can add weapons, better swimming parts and different mouths. One detail I liked is that as you get closer to the surface and grow larger you find less and less unique species and more of the select few that have been growing with you. Eventually it becomes time for your guy to grow some legs and explore some land although in retrospect I was a little disappointed this only lasted 20 minutes.
On land everything changes. Once you’ve decided what you want your Spore to look like (this is the stage that you tried in the creature creator) you’re brought to a 3d world. The graphics take a turn for the worse here, the textures are very low resolution and muddy and the game could use more anti aliasing (I was playing with settings on full). On the positive side the animation is decent and the frame rate stable. Your mission now is to set up your nest and make nice or kill your neighbours for their delicious parts. I chose a more pacifist route allying where possible except for some wimpy snail like creature I thought should be put out of its misery. Some species will be naturally hostile to you and you’ll have no choice to kill them. You ally with other animals by talking to them and then mimicking their actions things like singing, dancing or posing. As you evolve you’ll get new parts and be able to do new things. You’ll also be able to bring a posse with you, of either your friendly allies or your own species which can make the process easier (or the slaughter shorter). Unfortunately this stage gets repetitive quite quickly. Thankfully it only lasts an hour or so.
From there you go on to the tribal stage. The game play is similar except you have other responsibilities, collecting food, protecting food. You can also domesticate some of the other species that haven’t evolved as far as you but I couldn’t find any use for them for Neil Patrick Harris, a herbivore. Now you either kill or ally with the other tribes. Both options seem to give you the same reward – more equipment and some new parts for your species. You can grow your tribe by adding huts with tools to aid your conquest or form new alliances. You only have to do this 5 times however. This is when I realised that all the tribes around me had nothing to do with any species I had met previously. It seems like the game just resets everything after every stage and this seems like a missed opportunity. If you could build a connection it would certainly be more interesting to see how they grow with you. After about an hour and a half you should be done with this stage and it’s time to move to the big city.
The city stage is essentially a dumbed down RTS game. You capture spice derricks as an income, build houses, entertainment and factories in your city, decorate it and add turrets for defence. Oh by the way you design your City hall, the buildings, the cars, boats and planes you can use, so if you like the creature creator you should love this. Anyway once you have your cars you can start capturing the other cities the pop up. You do this either by religious or military means. Basically this involves building tanks or propaganda machines from your city with your spice/population income, right clicking the enemy city and clicking convert/capture. I’d like to think there’s strategy than that but when I played they were all horribly underdeveloped and I didn’t have any problems capturing them. When you have 4 cities you can build planes or boats and start going for cities overseas. Which are all very easy to capture and my surplus income had no problem replacing fallen soldiers. When I had captured all the small fry’s the only empire left (a species with more than two cities) surrendered to me and that was it. A little underwhelming.
From here to space except... I stopped playing a little after the space colonization stage which I think you could argue is the meat of the game. In this stage you have to take spice mined from your planets and trade with alien races. They will also offer you missions which you can do for some small rewards. You also have to colonize other planets but this process is expensive and requires probably multiple trips between the planet and your home planet. From the beginning of the game everything was quite intuitive but when I got to space I was quite overwhelmed, so much to do and so many places to explore. I’ll probably tackle it tonight.
