After years of hype, multiple awards and a lot of hullabaloo about digital rights management, Spore has finally reached store shelves. For Will Wright and the Maxis team, tackling the concept of evolution was, in their opinion, logical progression after their success with SimCity and The Sims. Spore breaks new ground in the realm of user-made content, with powerful creation tools that allow players to make their beasts, vehicles and buildings with ease. Yet it seems like in creating this technological and creative breakthrough, Maxis had to compromise by decreasing the complexity of the underlying game.

Spore was conceived on the basis of giving players the ability to create new creatures without having to learn to use advanced tools. Players are given a basic creature structure which they can manipulate by stretching and curving. Various parts for the creature can then be attached and modified in a similar fashion. Based on the parts you use and the shape of the creature, Spore will then procedurally generate all of its animations. The possibilities are limitless – and through Spore’s online service, the creations of other players are shared into your game, allowing for infinite variety. Creations aren’t limited to creatures; you also get to design your own buildings and vehicles in a similar fashion.


The main objective of Spore is to take a microscopic organism from the cusp of the primordial soup and shape the destiny of its race, as they evolve into land dwelling creatures, primitive tribes, an advanced technological society and eventually, a space-faring empire. The game is split into five uneven proportions to accomplish this; each of which is a game in itself. Your actions in each section of Spore shape not only your creature’s appearance, but also its personality, abilities and powers.

Your Spore journey begins by selecting a planet, and whether you’d like your creature to be a herbivore (plant eater) or carnivore (meat eater). Players are then plonked down in the middle of the cellular stage as the smallest being around. Survival is the name of the game here; you’ve got to eat the little bits of free floating food matter while dodging the larger creatures that’ve got their eye on you for their dinner.

Eating food will make your creature bigger. After a number of growth spurts, life in the pool gets more interesting, as you can find new parts for your creature inside meteor shards. You’ve only got a certain number of points you can spend on parts, which will mean making some tough decisions. A new pair of flippers or flagella can add the speed necessary to aid in escaping potential predators, while spikes or a poison pod give you the power to fight back. The cell segment is very basic, playing a lot like Snake. Controlling the game is simple and little is offered in the way of challenge or excitement. You’ll just want to get onto the next stage; a feeling which you will experience all too often during your time with Spore.


After outgrowing the cell stage, you gain a brain and a pair of legs, and the creature stage begins. Once on land, the focus shifts from survival to exploring the land, meeting/eating other species and finding new body parts. Befriending or consuming others results in gaining evolution points to spend on new parts, along with an increase in brain size. Spore begins to show a preference for the more violent style of play from here on. Playing peacefully requires wasting points on superfluous parts to impress other creatures with song and dance. Being evil just requires biting and whipping others, and snacking on their remains. Spore makes being nice a real hassle, and doesn’t offer a reward proportionate to the effort required.

Creatures will eventually develop sapience and form a basic tribal society. This is Spore’s weakest point; a basic real-time strategy segment where one essentially continues their activities from the creature stage on a larger scale. It’s incredibly boring, devoid of fun and contains a bunch of issues with basic mechanics like path finding. The first elements of micromanagement are introduced in this section, as you must manage a food supply, which forms the basis of your economy. You lose control over your creature’s evolution – whatever features the creature had when they moved into the stage will be stuck with them forever. Given the theme of the game, not being able to evolve in the billion or so years after this point is just silly. Basic clothing can be added to the creature to give attribute bonuses, but it’s not the same.


After completing your totem (by becoming friends with or destroying the other tribes), your tribe evolves into a civilisation. You design your civilisation’s headquarters and vehicles before being thrust into the thick of world politics. The goal of this stage is to unify the civilisations and control the flow of spice. One can take over opposing cities through religious, economic or military means to gain more spice and better technology. Economic takeovers come through establishing trade routes and offering to buy the other civilisation out. Religious and military takeovers are more confrontational, requiring you to send vehicles to the other cities to either attack and destroy structures, or convert their citizens. The aggressive approach seems to be the quickest path to take. It’s simple and shallow real-time strategy, but slightly more satisfying than the tribal stage.

Unification of the civilisations sparks the space program, allowing you to design your own UFO and take it for a test flight. After breaking through your home planet’s atmosphere, you’ll be at the mercy of outer space. The space stage is the payoff for trudging through the lesser sections of the game. It feels more rewarding taking your creature through the process from microscopic organism to space-faring warmonger as opposed to just starting off in space. Starting from the beginning also entitles you to a few extra bonuses, based on the way you handled the earlier stages. It’s overwhelming at first; you’ve got no money, there are tens of thousands of planets, filled with races that are more advanced than yours. The novelty wears off rather quickly, though.


Expanding your empire, forging alliances and spice trading are your primary objectives for the space stage. These objectives rely on Sporebucks, the galactic standard currency. Colonisation is the key to expansion. Players purchase a colony pack, find a suitable planet (based on terrain quality (Terrascore) and spice type) and shoot the pack down to the surface. Adding structures to a colony enhances their spice gathering efficiency. Tools can be bought that allow you to manipulate the atmosphere and temperature of a planet, making it more habitable by increasing the Terrascore. Placing different flora and fauna on the surface will lock in a specific Terrascore. The better the score, the more buildings you can place to boost production. Spice is the best way to make money quickly – each planet has a specific type of spice (red, yellow, blue, green and pink), and each race has certain spice requirements, and will pay more for the type of spice they need the most.

Forging alliances is the key to your success as a space-faring race. You’ve got to become cosy with the other races before you can ally with them, either by giving them large cash incentives, setting up trade routes, or by completing missions for them. At first, missions are kind of fun – going to a planet and abducting a creature, fetching precious cargo, or destroying someone that race doesn’t like. Unfortunately, thanks to a complete lack of variety, you’ll soon be repeating the same missions ad nauseum. If that wasn’t bad enough, most of your allies are major sissies who can’t solve their own problems, so you’ll be baby-sitting them, defending them from alien attacks and eco-disasters. That’s at least until you get sick of them and blow them up, or acquire their planets by buying out the trade routes.


Progress in space comes via badge points, earned for doing specific tasks associated with badges, such as declaring war on systems, starting colonies, buying things, and accumulating wealth. Collecting badges gives you badge points which raise your rank (up to Omnipotent, the final rank) and unlock upgrades for your ship and colonies. After a couple of hours, you’ll be able to manipulate the structure and atmosphere of planets without needing to buy tools from the shops, as well as upgrade your ship with better weapons, wider travel range, more health and the ability to use wormholes for fast travel. The best weapons come towards the end of the game, including the Planet Buster, which lets you destroy a planet, Death Star style.

The space stage has a basic story regarding a mysterious race called the Glox, giving players something a little more substantial to work towards. Of course, by the time you encounter the Glox, you’ll be running on empty, fed up with samey missions, baby-sitting allies, with a maxed out rank meter. Maxis has stated that there is actually a definitive ending to Spore, but it’s hidden away so that only the most hardcore players will find it.


Spore is going to disappoint most gamers. The technical side is very impressive; Spore breaks new ground for user created content with its robust creature creator and procedurally generated assets. As good as the tech is, one can’t help but be disappointed by some of the restrictions – earning evolution points prevents you front creating outrageous creatures with fifty legs, gills and a trunk, for example. Unlocked parts don’t necessarily carry over between games – so if you start on the creature stage, you have to find all of those bits again (whereas starting on the tribal stage will see all of those parts already unlocked).

The technological focus seems to have come at the expense of the gameplay; Spore just isn’t all that fun. There are five separate games at play here, but only the space stage has a level of complexity that gamers will be satisfied by. The game is unbalanced; being violent is easy, but you don’t get a sufficient reward for putting the effort into playing nicely. It’s disappointing that the game just dispenses away with evolutionary progress at the start of the tribal stage, too. In a way, it feels like Spore is designed more for the casual gaming audience as an introduction to other popular genres. The crowd that is not familiar with each of the genres addressed by Spore is more likely to enjoy the overall experience a lot more. Spore is worth checking out for its advanced technology, but serious gamers will be let down by the lack of depth and complexity in many areas.

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