http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/spore-review.ars/1
http://kotaku.com/5048315/spore-review-evolutionary-creationism
I bought it. I played it. I don’t want to be one of those other reviews that complains solely about the DRM, so I’m going to list a few other flaws. What I’m not going to do is talk about what Spore does right. Despite the things it does right, these few things it does wrong cripple the gaming experience.
1. The DRM is vicious, like your kid sister who just discovered you necking with the girl next door and lords it over you… forever… or at least until you grow up and move away. Because that’s what it will take to get rid of the bad qualities of this game, giving it up.
2. Each stage of the game (prior to the Space Age) is excessively short and difficult to obtain desired results. Each stage is so random that I’m left wondering why I have such control over the creator tools. Additionally, achievements from one game to the next do not overlap. So you have to win your achievements anew each game.
3. No auto save. And this is huge. Since it is effectively a strategy game, if you make a mistake, you’re not just quitting, you’re losing the entire game to-date. As far as I can tell, the save function isn’t fantastic either, as you cannot save variations on a theme. It’s one save slot per campaign (multiple campaigns, granted)… but once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
4. Combat in the Space age is clumsy and requires 13 year old reflexes and a 46″ monitor to obtain enough detail… oh wait, the game is recommended to be played and 1024×768 and not at a higher resolution. And, if you have a multi-GPU video card, you have to disable your multi-GPU configuration (read: make your video card run slower and less efficiently) in order for the game to even start.
5. It’s impossible to find anything in a 3 dimension space projected on a 2 dimensional surface. Whoever thought that trying to find a needle in a galaxy (you can zoom out as far as the galaxy map and in as far as the planet surface) would be fun when you cannot get depth perception going was a moron. You want me to get what, from where? Right I’ll just look on my map… look at all the pretty stars, what did you want again? And where is it? And how do I find that one item, on this one planet, in this one star system, among thousands of star systems? Brilliant.
6. According to Will Wright, you’re supposed to be punished if you’re too aggressive, and yet I found that the game was harder when I tried to be a herbivore, pacifist, social creature than by going carnivore/warrior or omnivore/industrial. The fact of the matter is, no matter how much more difficult it is to deal with a hostile universe, it’s a lot harder when you can’t eat your enemy (and when they’re not afraid of you.) Sun Tzu would have something snappy and full of wisdom to say about this.
7. The tutorial on any stage past the Civilization Stage eats heiney. When you start as one social methodology (religious/industrious/aggressive?) and capture another, there needs to be a better tutorial to explain how things are done for the new city type. There isn’t.
8. In the Space Age, when you set a building type for a given planet/colony, it should carry over (or at least you should have the option of it carrying over). Instead, every time you acquire a new colony (even another city on the same planet) you have to specify what the buildings will look like for each building. If you want some consistancy, you won’t get it without resorting to searching through the sporepedia (even if you limit it to just your creations, because after a while, you’ll have more than a few creations in your sporepedia library.)
9. Using creatures from your own sporepedia (when playing offline) makes it near impossible to identify differences in creatures between terraforming tiers. In my most recent game, I had 5 different variations of the same creature show up in the 6 herbivore slots for my T3 planet. When looking for T2/T3 creatures to populate my growing colonies, I had to spend more than 10 minutes per expansion hunting down that special T2/T3 creature.
10. You don’t get the choice not to share your creatures if you play while logged in to Spore.com. If you don’t want to share your creatures, then the best solution is to not play online. But, if you don’t play online, you get stuck with the flaw in #9 above. Egg/Chicken, bkh’kaw!
11. There are no planet/town/empire management tools in the Space Age. In order to manage anything, you have to micromanage. One of the inexcusable flaws of 4E strategy games is the lack of empire management tools. Spore breaks this rule like the Air Force breaking the sound barrier. While I’m not opposed to some of the mandates, having some reports capable of helping direct your efforts would be highly desirable. After all, if you have resources to collect, it’d be nice to know where to go rather than letting them overflow the resource collection limits of your colonies and see those resources wasted. (That’s right, if you don’t make a stop by the location every 15 minutes, you just might arrive to discover that the local colonists have had their version of the Boston Tea Party.)
I could go on, but I’ll stop to try to keep this review short.
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That sounds too bad. I know you said that you’re really only mentioning the bad parts– overall, are you enjoying it? Jennifer’s expressed some interest and I’ll send her your review– I hope that if it’s mostly bad, we can pass until it’s patched/Spore 2 is released.
Updates:
3. The missing Autosave kills. I’ve found several bugs where you cannot exit a planet in the Space Age, but you cannot save the game while you’re on a planet. Catch-22 and very frustrating to think that you might have lost hours of game play because you forgot to hit Ctrl-S regularly.
4. Combat is really clumsy, but when you progress to “level 10″ (the farthest amount of advancement permitted in the Space Age), you can requisition 5 ships from 5 different allies to fly wingman. They help deal with enemies pretty quickly, and the weapons you get late-game are deadly.
5. The only way that you can manage to find anything is to explore everything. If you do that, then you get markers to point you in the right direction. The problem is, just meeting aliens meens that some of the naturally hostile ones will begin to want your throat. Again a Catch-22
6. You must either kill or bribe anything you come across. Unfortunately, early game, you don’t have the 10k, 50k or 100k to bribe hostile aliens, which means that you end up on the bad side of aliens fairly easily. The only way to deal with this is to make an alliance with a friendly alien and then spend ~50k to bribe them in to attacking your enemies. They’ll continue a war until the hostile alien is extinct on your behalf (sometimes needing another 50k cash infusion to keep the war moving along). Once the enemy has been beaten far away from your systems, they’ll no longer bother to encroach on your territories.
11. Is really inexcusable.
12. There will be no patches with new content, but Spore will have numerous expansions like The Sims (they’ve already threatened them on consumers).
Additionally, there are other problems which I’ve not mentioned before that you only find late in the game like:
13. Once you get to Level 10 at the Space Age, you have pretty much mastered the (sinfully undocumented) methods for dealing with aliens and empire expansion. You’ll have a number of friends who are loaning you wingman support. The game gets monotonous except whereby you try to get to the center of the universe and deal with the game ups and downs along that trip.
I’ve not yet managed to make it to the center of the Galaxy, but I’ve started my trip. I won’t spoil the rest of the game for you in case you feel like giving it a spin yourself.
I’d say that the badge system (which is nothing more than a way to stroke your ego at accomplishing things that Spore designers thought noteworthy… like spending 50 hours playing Spore) is worth pursuing for certain hard to achieve objectives, but largely is quite worthless.
Once you’ve made it to the Space Age, you could have a lot of fun just building creatures, buildings and vehicles. There’s something artistic about it. Frankly, I don’t have the drive myself, I did create a single run of high quality models for one game which is my primary game at the moment.
Most of the time, I’m trying to have fun playing the game rather than taking an hour intermission between evolutionary stages to tweak my creature, building or vehicles.