Spore: The Geekscape Review

So every year at Comic Con there is one thing that steals the show. It’s the one thing above all others that you can’t stop talking about, that leaves you ravenous for whatever product is being sold. Now, this is generally a big movie presentation on Friday or Saturday when the Con is in full swing. It’s usually in the main exhibit hall and prefaced by a fair degree of pomp and circumstance. And it’s always something you haven’t seen before. Last year it was Iron Man. The year before it was 300.

This year was a bit odd. The coolest thing at Comic Con (and perhaps this has more to do with an underwhelming Comic Con than anything else) was early on the first day, it was in a small upstairs hall, and it was a presentation on something we had all seen and heard an awful lot of for an awful long time. It was Spore.

Legendary game designer Will Wright (The Sims, SimCity) took the stage with a laptop in hand and proceeded to give one of the most interesting lectures I’ve ever heard. He spoke of the history of media, of the repetitive cycle of new media going from utility to entertainment to art, of his love of science, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and an awful lot about his love of space in general. The speech was fascinating, funny, and educational. It was one of my favorite things I have ever seen at Comic Con and he hadn’t shown a bit of the game yet.

When he finally did show the game and you could see how he was applying all the elements from his lecture into the gameplay, it really was amazing.  My mind raced with the possibilities of all this game could be. Then, the early reviews came out.

I was shocked to hear the game being called shallow and repetitive. How could this be true? Had Will Wright pulled the wool over my eyes? Had I drank the Kool Aid?

Well, yes and no.

As a game, yes, Spore is shallow and repetitive. To steal an analogy (from Ars Technica, I believe), Spore is like the world’s largest kiddie pool. 5 miles wide and two feet deep. The game covers the whole of the universe. You start as a microscopic organism and end up conquering the cosmos. However, every step of the way involves an extremely stripped down and rudimentary version of much better games and pretty much everything can be played using only the mouse.

The first stage, Cell, is very reminiscent of the PSN downloadable game Flow. You simply swim around trying to find things to eat while not getting eaten yourself. It’s short and simple but also fun and charming. The visuals here are the most impressive of the game until you get to space. It’s also here that you’re introduced to the creature creator, albeit an extremely stripped down version of it. I would explain the creature creator but it’s unnecessary. You already know how it works unless you’ve been without the internet for the last few years, in which case you’ll never see this.

From there you move to the Creature phase where your creature moves to land. Here the goal is to befriend or kill the other wild animals in your area. The gameplay is reminiscent of an MMORPG. You basically walk around and click the same button over and over to either kill or communicate with other animals.  Yes, it is repetitive and dull. But it is here that the game’s true draw becomes clear. The creatures on the land with you are culled from the vast amount of user created content in the Sporepedia. Everything you create in the game is stored in a giant online database, and the game periodically downloads these creations to populate the galaxy. It also serves as a sort of social network as you are able to befriend people, which greatly increases the chance that their content will show up in your game. It’s fascinating to see the things people come up with and incredibly satisfying to destroy a colony of your buddy’s creatures.

Once you’ve evolved enough in this stage you move on to Tribal which works like an extremely simple RTS. You gather resources and create troops to defend or expand your tribe. There isn’t a whole lot to do in this stage as far as creation goes because your creature is pretty much finalized by this point. You can outfit them with some clothes, however.

From here you advance to Civilization which, unsurprisingly, plays like a stripped down version of Sid Meir’s Civilization. You no long control individual units. Instead you control towns and your goal is to take over the globe my force, economics, or religious conversion. Civilization is also the most creation heavy phase in the game. You create each individual building and vehicle and as such this phase can be quite time consuming. However, another great thing about the Sporepedia is if you don’t feel like creating your own content you don’t have to. Everything that anyone else has created is available to you and you can simply search through the database to find something you like and then download it into your game.

Now, up to this point everything has definitely fallen in line with the reviews saying the game is shallow. All of these modes are pretty substandard for what they are. However, they move along at a brisk pace so you are never spending enough time in any of them to become bored and you can have a great time creating, sharing, and viewing content. The game changes significantly in the next phase however.

Space is a whole other monster and in many ways is the “real” game. This will probably come as a surprise to many as Spore has been sold mostly based on its creature creator and early stages of the game. Creatures are front and center in the marketing. However, all that is over and done with in a few hours and then you are left with the massive space phase. All the depth that is missing from the game prior shows up here. You literally have the whole galaxy to peruse at your leisure and to do with as you wish. You can terraform and colonize planets, make alliances or go to war with other star systems, harvest and trade spice, explore to find rare artifacts or creatures, accept missions from other civilizations, or simply explore the galaxy and take in the sights. There is no real end game. You earn badges by doing various tasks and there is a point where you will have earned all the badges you can but the game doesn’t stop. You could quite literally play this mode forever.

You can feel Will Wright’s love of space here. It really is a beautiful and wonderous thing. Coming across a black hole or twin suns is almost awe inspiring. And it makes you realize what the true purpose of Spore is. Spore isn’t so much a video game as we think of it. It in fact does rather poorly as a game in many respects. Instead, it is more of an experience. A fascinating hands-on look at evolution. An incredible content creation and sharing tool. A true virtual playground.

I am reminded of that Will Wright speech as I play. That feeling of learning something new, that joy of discovery, of realizing what a vast and wonderful world we live in. Sure, this is the pop-up book version of science but it sparks an interest, it opens your mind, it encourages creativity, and it manages to be entertaining at the same time. And I think that deserves credit.

Of course, if you are looking for something with in-depth gameplay that will test your wits and dexterity and you could care less about creating and sharing your own world or exploring the darkest reaches of space then this means nothing to you. You will hate this game. I am quite fond of it but even I have to admit the gameplay early on stinks.

But I traveled through a black hole in a pirate ship powered by hot air balloons and propellers to meet an alien race of mustachioed bananas who I allied with in order to go to war with vile creatures created by our very own Scapists. And that, my friends, is AWESOME.