Huh, I actually kinda love Spore. A lot. I did not see that coming.. I just couldn’t let go once I started. It’s quite intoxicating!
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But it’s also a frustrating experience, the game ultimately fails to give me the relief I crave. It’s like… it falls prey to its own vastness. Allow me to explain. Once in space the galaxy is so huge, so unbelievably ginormous and teeming with life and possibilities, that the tools you’re provided ends up not cutting it. Like so many make-colonies-on-planets games the level of control you operate your empire with is just way too detailed for when you want to be making more abstract decisions. It’s not a problem at first, in the beginning it’s really rewarding visiting planets manually, seeding them with life or fighting enemy cities. It’s so fun exploring and building up your own colonies. You want to do all these things. But as your empire grows you reach a point where it all starts becoming a lot of tedious work. What the hell planet did I build an orbiting defense gun on? Which ones did I put a biosphere-protection facility on? My God it becomes so unwieldy.
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And you will get a big empire, whether you trade or fight it’s the way it goes. I soooo wish there was, like, a sixth stage, maybe after you reach the center you’d transcend and stop needing to be so hands on. I’d like to point at a starsystem and decide which planets to seed and which ones to destroy, to decide where my empire should go but not actually travel to the star system and release the individual tree into its biosphere. I want to set up an armada so I don’t have to friggin’ fly to every last system that comes under attack to personally deal with the problem. Give me the tools to shape the galaxy as I see fit!
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Because fun and awesome as the game is I’m frustrated by its inefficiencies, of wanting to affect large parts of the galaxy but being unable to enact my vision. The game ends because I don’t want to spend the next four hundred hours manually taking over systems, and that’s a shame. It should end when I can’t think of more fun things to do and try.
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More specifically on the actual game though, the early phases are a little hit or miss. You race through the cell phase, it goes by sooo damn fast. I enjoyed settling into a new evolutionary niche, but every time I came to grips with the new order it was all wooosssh and off to the next part. It’s was adorable having my little creature slowly change into the eat-anything shock-stab-bite creature I ended up with, but I never really got the time to play him. On a whim I decided to be an aggressive cell, chomping down on everything that could fit in my mouth.
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The creature stage is more demanding, pitting your herd against other herds. Well, more like lil’ ol’ me against the whole world, so it was a bit of work taking out groups of enemy creatures. But through some fancy kiting and being aware of close by healing nests you can take down creatures quite a bit out of your level range, all in all it was fun in a simplified-WoW-kind-of-way. I think you sing and dance in this phase?, not that I’d know because I carefully killed everything and everyone I came across. Might as well go with that works eh?
The Tribes phase literally went by without me noticing. You’re supposed to deal with these five competing tribes but I murdered the four of them before they even raised as much as a finger on me and the fifth fell maybe two minutes after they repelled my initial attack. Not a lot to do here, but maybe that was a function of my aggressiveness. Killing works though!
Civilization stage is fun, but very simple. Build cities, take over the world. I just build armies of tanks and marched them to enemy cities for some good rape and plundering. At some point I used the option to just nuke whoever was left, leaving me the winner by default. The only thing that killed me in this phase were these gigantic creatures that roamed the countryside. They stomped the shit out of anything but the largest forces I could amass (Actually one of those gigantic animals survived even to the space stage, where it STILL kicked the shit out of me. Mean beasts!).
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And then it was over. Time for space. I loved the space part, but looking back I wouldn’t've minded a bit more of the other stages. But Jesus Christ space is lolhuge. There’s a real sense of exploration and empire building as you make your first colony, fight a little war, explore, and then you zoom out and realize you’re in this tiny tiny quadrant in the lower left of the galaxy. You constantly get new gadgets to play with, their reward system is so robust that I never wanted it to stop. I went at it fighting (of course), why change what works for you? So yeah, I killed everything I came across, squashing the empires in my area and making no friends. I still don’t know how the alliance system works… *shrug*. It was funny actually, I kept finding artifacts hinting of some mysterious evil race that killed everything in their path, clearly they would be a race after my own liking.
It’s a fun and challenging part of the game, I kept having to balance earning money, wanting to explore, going to raid my closest enemies and countering their attacks. Finally everyone in the immediate vicinity were dead, which that stopped the constant attacks on my colonies. I was free to explore. But I was also getting frustrated by my own early missteps. It actually wasn’t until the very end of the game I really got the hang of terraforming or even how to properly produce spice so I had a bunch of colonies that didn’t go anywhere. I could either go back and change everything, but that’d take ages, so I figured fuck that noise this empire is getting too crowded anyway. It was time to strike out on my own, see what was out there. Maybe find that famous Center of the Galaxy everyone kept mentioning. So I loaded up on as much loot and money as I could and set off! In, errr, the wrong direction. Twenty minutes later I passed through my empire en route towards the center, ahem. Holy shit it’s a big fucking galaxy, did I say that already? I eventually met that mysterious evil race, but for a couple reasons I didn’t actually realize who they were at the time. I just thought they were yet another empire I’d race through. If you’ve played Spore you probably know what happens next.
Paying them little attention I continued my journey. In a moment of foreshadowing I did notice an unusual number of the stars ahead had radio signals coming from them, indicating a larger-than-usual empire. But I figured what the hell, I’m a fast clicker, I had navigated through enemy empires before without taking much damage. And actually these guys weren’t even attacking me, so I raced on. I raced on until I was well and truly fucked-up-the-ass neck deep inside their omgwtf-huge empire. It was an endless stretch of systems under their control. And this was when they decided to pounce on me. A thousand fucking ships came screaming from every goddamn star system in the area, and pummeled me regardless of how fast I navigated the stars. With health quickly dropping I had a panicky stroke of genius and dove straight for one of the few unprotected star systems around to made a base and recharge. Well what the fuck can you do?, I certainly couldn’t go back! So I continued this pattern for a while, frantically jumping through their systems vaguely in a direction towards The Center and setting down a base to repair once my health got low. It was a pretty successful tactic actually, had it not been for my cursed too-short-range engine. I kept hitting dead ends and had to retract many of my steps. And, well, I was frustrated that my colonies were so shitty, that my planets were shitty, and I didn’t want the game to end when I had failed so miserably on that account. So the gagglarians, a proud and aggressive bipedal species, ended up.. uh.. somewhere within the central area of the galaxy without truly reaching their goal.
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This is where I started a new race. A mighty race. But that’s another boring story for another boring day. Long story short: I have completed the game using that species, and I didn’t want to play anymore after reaching the center. If I had higher-level tools available I’d want to sculpt the galaxy to my liking, but doing that right now would literally take many months of hard work.
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I’m exhausted and impressed by the game, but also want more. I don’t know how fair that is. If I had to rate it I’d be torn between something really high for its initial impression or something more subdued because it doesn’t quite deliver that overall long-term brilliant experience.