Spore

Location: England, Kent
Age: 16
Time played: around 20 hours
Preferred Creature Type: Undecided

My Review:
Spore has finally arrived and does it fulfil all the expectations I had for it, well no but then again I doubt any game is as good as we imagine in our minds (except pong), but spore is a very vast, creative and overall fun game which is something a lot of games forget to be nowadays. Sure they may have brilliant graphics and brilliant set pieces but lots of games nowadays feel more like work then entertainment. Thankfully spore is not one of those games it is instead an innovative, odd and very fun game with constant variety.

The game is divided into 5 different stages the first of which is cell where you control a little guy (or girl but who can tell) who goes around eating either chunks of meat or plants you decide which you want to eat at the start of your game. After getting your cell to a reasonable size you can move onto land and start evolving your creature this is the creature stage and depending on your actions in cell you’ll be finding the other natives of the planet and either eating them, dancing and singing for them or a little bit of both doing either of these things is relatively easy.

you just choose your creatures stance to be either aggressive or friendly to fight them you simply click them and watch your creature go at it, you can also employ a number of attack moves in combat depending on how you have chosen to evolve your creature. If you don’t want to go the war hungry path you can be sociable to the creatures and try to befriend them you do this by playing a simple game of Simon says with your creature mimicking the other creatures actions if you succeed they will become your friend if not well they might eat you.

There are many other things you can do in creature as you slowly evolve up such as forming a gang of creatures to go hunt or woo more creatures, there are also a number of surprising events in this stage which are quite surprising but its better if you experience them yourself. Anyway once you've eaten or charmed enough DNA your creatures will form together as a tribe

This stage of the game is a very dumb down real time strategy with you controlling up to twelve of you creatures, and trying to take control of the landmass your on as in creature, there are a variety of ways to do this. You can outright attack them using stone axes and other weapons, or you can try and befriend them by playing music. I found this stage to be the shortest and quickest stage overall, considering there’s only 6 other tribes to take over it was still a fun little stage though. But this stage serves as a sort of tutorial for the next larger stage Civilisation.

In civilisation your humble tribe has gone on and evolved into a proper civilisation which will again based on your previous actions be based around either war and taking over cities by force, trading with other cities and buying them out or my favourite religious where you go to the city and blast a huge hologram of your creature over there city. Its also at this point you get to use some of the games other editors.

The building editor which is a lot of fun to play around with, as unlike creatures they don't need to animate much so you can build them however you want using a variety of tools you can design your own houses, factories and places of entertainment and make them look however you want. I for instance has my warrior civilisation complete with fighting pits for entertainment, militarised barracks for them to live in and a munitions factory.

You also get your hands on the vehicle editor, which is just as much fun to play around with as you can design your own vehicles for military use, religious use and trading use and you each specialty has a land vehicle, water masterpiece and air theses these can all be as strange as you want and are a lot of fun. The civ stage is not hugely in-depth but its not too shallow either, you can form alliances with different cities, with different factors all affecting how hospitable to you they are, you can bribe people, choose who to attack and much more its not too difficult to win though and so this stage isn’t immensely long either but then you enter the final stage.

Space, yes space space to quote Douglas Adams is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind bogglingly big it is. What’s even better is that you can explore everything in it and do whatever you want space is what all the rest of the game seems to be leading up to.

Lets start at the beginning shall we first after have united your planet in togetherness (possibly with lots of nukes) you build your spaceship. The spaceship editor is basically all the vehicle editors thrown in together with some space stuff added and you can basically build whatever you want to fly round in a X-Wing?, fine, a giant mushroom?, also fine, a dead corpse?, also fine but you scare me so please never come near me Anyway once you've completed your masterpiece you can take off and do some missions for your race or you can just go off and do your thing. And what a thing it will be, you can do whatever you want go off colonise and terraforming worlds by using tools such as volcano creators or cloud suckers, or you could go around starting wars with every boggled eyed creation you find zooming around blowing up planets.

Space is basically where about 70% of the main game is but there’s so many tools to play around with and things to do its hard to get bored, also if you are bewildered by the freeness there’s also an overarching plot to the game which involves getting to the centre of the galaxy, so if you choose to do so you can try and break through I think what you find there is worth it

You can also set your own goals like finding all the storybook planets such as earth and mars (which are fun to destroy) or perhaps you want to build a trading empire go ahead. However space being the biggest stage, also has the biggest problems namely the space pirates, I have played through three times with different creatures taking different paths and I always find once my empire has got to a certain point that I spend my time zooming onto planet after planet to shoot a couple of measly ships. As my turrets may as well be firing custard for all the good they do however I’m sure this is something that will be patched.

So overall spore's game play is good always keeping you interested by hopping from one thing to the next making it hard for boredom to set it. The graphics in the game are not brilliant but they don't need to be as there adequate for there purpose and some things such as black holes do look very pretty.

This is a game which basically is worth the money, considering the lifespan of most games nowadays its refreshing to find a game you could happily clock 40+ hours into. This review only covers the basics of the game there’s so much more I could write about the creation sharing, finding epics, all the editors but I'll leave that all for you to find so go on get spore its worth your £24.99

Primary likes of the game:
The sheer variety in game play and visuals
All the little places to explore and strange things to find
The centre of the galaxy

Primary dislikes of the game:
Space pirates and homicidal AI
Some stages could have had more depth

Rating: 9.0

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That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"

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Needs moar Punctuation :O

that was a wall of text that was unsightley and hard to remember were i was when i was reading it but glad you thought it was good i get it tomorrow can't wait.

ok, mockingness aside, i think that the constant bombardments are the only problem. what difficulty were you on?