Mike Bantick
Monday, 08 September 2008 09:16
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
And the heart of spore is the Spore Creator. This will attract the largest audience to the game – already evident in the overwhelming response to the pre-release Creature Creator software that Maxis made available some months ago.
In the Creators (the same interface carries through all of Spore’s stages) creatures (and then in later stages, vehicles, buildings, spaceships and more) are thrown together and coloured with a series of tabs and design elements. Each element can then be modified further, stretching, rotating and bending to your heart’s content.
Creature creating is the most rewarding, and with Spore’s procedures set to bring the wackiest creations to life, you will be spending a large amount of time tooling around with the Creator interface.
Once legs have been added, Spore gives you the option of crawling from the ooze onto dry land and into the Creature Stage of the game. These stage transitions are always optional, and in fact, once the game has been played through once, any of the stages can instantly be accessed in later games. Many will do this, as each stage is an evolution from the next, providing an expanded game that will have many focusing on certain stages as their favourites.
Creature Stage will have your new creation wandering the primitive landscape, meeting other small bands of animals and either making allies or battling for supremacy. Depending on your path during the Cell stage, you will be either good at one of these options or a have the choice of both to a lesser degree. For me, this is the weakest of the stages in pure game play, the ‘making friends’ options become somewhat tedious and the offensive options are difficult to deploy in action.
There is the sense of awe with crawling onto Terra Firma for the first time, and with an abundance of wild life, including the odd gigantic creature lurking about the map, as well as ambient primitive sounds and undulating terrain, there is certainly much to look at and run from.
Again, once the requisite goals have been achieved – in this case culminating in forming a cohesive tribe – the Tribal Stage becomes available. Again choices made during the Creature Stage will have ramifications moving on. An historical timeline is shown at the conclusion of each stage, listing the important moments of the stage and how the player reacted.
The flexibility of play styles, whilst never breaking much away from Social vs Agression is a hallmark of Spore that transcends the stages of the game.
During the Tribal Stage, game-play becomes much more like a typical Real Time Strategy game. Players will control a small tribe as it attempts to assimilate other creature tribes, via war, economic or social means. Base building becomes a skill, and tribal dress codes can enhance the abilities of each tribe member.
