INB280 Game Analysis: Spore (PC)

Game Summary

Spore is a sim game produced by EA in 2008. Will Wright who is best known for the Sims series designed spore and his past work comes through in this title because that’s what spore is. Instead of simulating a dull suburban lifestyle where you control a bunch of drones to make them eat work and cheat on their wives, you instead take control of a single celled organism and guide its evolution and later on socio-technological development until it becomes a galactic superpower.

Game analysis

Spore is essentially 5 games mashed into 1. There’s the packmanesque cell stage, creature, tribe, civilization and finally space stage. Each represents a different stage of evolutionary development, actually the evolution part finishes at the end of the creature stage and everything after is more like costume design.

Spores biggest flaw is that each stage has its own set of unit and camera controls and switching between all these different styles of play and their respective controls becomes confusing especially if you’re working from cell to space in one continuous game.

The game its self doesn’t really open up until you reach the space stage. But even then you’ll find your progress hindered by empires who what to kill you for no reason, the fact your ship is so piss weak it may as well be built out of crackers. Also the sheer amount of upgrades you’ll have to buy in order to make your ship useful is staggering and their cost is so high that you’ll spend most of the game whizzing around different empires to make money to by upgrades because all trading and money making is done by YOU alone.

Conclusion

As some one whos never been able to play the Sims for more than half an hour before getting bored, i will say that Spore is a vast improovement that at least mixes things up rather than you guide a bunch of boring drones through their day to day life. But Spores variety is also its biggest flaw, the constant switiching of controlls from stage to stage makes the game play feel jerky, and even once you get to the space stage and become a galactic superpower things get very tedious, very quickly.