Maxis' 'Spore' fails to evolve

By Chase Koeneke

Published Sept. 22, 2008

"Spore" plays like a birthday clown to a five year old: You begin thinking that it's going to be the greatest thing that's ever happened to you and then 10 minutes into the act you realize it isn't nearly as much fun as you thought it'd be. Although there's nothing terrible about "Spore," there's nothing terribly exciting about it either.

The game is divided into five "stages," each like its own separate (yet very simplistic) game. To advance, you must perform specific tasks to fill your progress bar, which, when full, will allow you to access the next stage.

Players begin in the primordial soup, a single-celled organism playing a glorified version of Pac-Man until they eat enough to evolve into a land critter. This begins the second, and most fun stage of "Spore," the creature stage. You begin by building the beast you will eventually control. Give him eyes to see, legs to run, even some spikes for self-defense. If you played the previously released "Spore Creature Creator," you'll be right at home. You then run around a sparsely populated world either making friends with other creations or killing them. Doing so will give you new parts for your critter that you can outfit on him by mating with another of your species. It's great fun, if a little monotonous, but the new parts you get keep this stage fresh.

The rest of the stages are where "Spore" begins to upset. Once you enter the tribe stage, you no longer feel attached to your Darwinian masterpiece. There is no more customizing of your creature and any spikes or speedy legs you may have given him are completely nullified. You're now playing a simplistic real-time strategy game, except that's it's also very confusing because you don't have any specialized units.

Once you manage to stumble through to the civilization stage, you've pretty much lost all contact with your original creation. The space stage seems like the one the developers worked the hardest on, but to be honest, I was losing interest. There is a lot to do: collect equipment, analyze creatures, terra-form planets, but you've completely lost touch with your fuzzy little avatar, the best part of the entire game.

It took me about five hours to get to the final stage of "Spore." I would have really liked to see each individual stage go more in-depth. They all had a few things going for them, but none of them had me clambering for more. It felt like one of those Web sites with all of the little web games - each one has its own little gimmick, but none of them are going to enthrall players for hours on end.

No other game offers as much variety as "Spore" does - it has an amazing creature creator that imaginative people will adore, and the different stages do an effective job of mixing up the game play. It just doesn't do enough to make it a worthy purchase. I wanted a balloon animal puppy, but all I got was a snake. Stupid clowns.