Spore's actually quite lame
It's immersive, definitely. You'll probably spend a couple of long sessions on this game. However, I guarantee that all of this will be in 1 month, before it gets lost amongst the rest of your games.
Despite all the hype about its innovation, Spore is essentially a linear game. Take out the creation of objects and this sums up Spore:
~ Cell stage: Go eat stuff, poke other cells, eat them, collect shields if you get bored. Oh, and start mating. Or is that reproducing? Ah, screw it.
~ Creature stage: Go round making allies or killing rival species. Develop your creature. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
~ Tribal stage: Rough equivalent of Warcraft III against some guy who rushes Priestess of the Moon and Archers 2 minutes into the game. Simply wait for the tribes to attack you, defeat them then counter-attack and bingo, tribe defeated.
~ Civilization stage - See Tribal stage, but with vehicles.
~ Space stage - immersive, but incredibly repetitive. Often reduced to doing Legend of Zelda-like mini-quests for your allies. Spaceship is either overpowered or underpowered depending on how you do things.
In the end, there are 5 stages and essentially there's only 1-2 main tasks you can do.
Because it's Maxis, it's easy to compare this to The Sims (2). However, the first Sims game was infinitely more interesting. While you don't get to stick horns on your family, the number of things you can do in The Sims is in the thousands. Spore can only match that through object creation.
I really wanted to like this game but unfortunately it's very hard to figure out what's so good about this game besides creating objects. Reflect on it a day after you've made it to the Space stage - what have you actually found fun? Certainly not mashing buttons 1, 2, 3 and 4 killing the 5-6 species grouped together about 50 times.
I've said to ignore the object creator for a reason - this is absolute genius. The way it works is incredible and the ability to share your creations online will take off quite well. With a couple of add-ons or upgrades to Spore, this could see arguably the world's most complete character generator in video gaming.
In a nutshell, I don't know about this game. The hype kind of hurt it quite badly - without the hype, this game would probably go down with the likes of the many, many games with brilliant ideas but terrible execution. It's more of an intriguing rather than entertaining game, which is a huge shame.
That said, this game is great for younger children, in my opinion.
7/10
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