Friday 3 May 2013

BA6 Contextual Studies - 'Spore' game review




‘Spore’ is an ambitious ‘god-game’ from the creator of the famous ‘The Sims’ series, Will Wright.  On paper, the premise of ‘Spore’ sounds exciting; the player takes a race of single-celled organisms, swimming around in a primordial soup, right through the evolutionary chain, up to galactic conquest.  It sounds like an impressive concept for a game, but in practise, ‘Spore’ falls short of its expectations. ‘Spore’ deals with very serious, ‘real’ issues, like; war, conquest, colonisation, expansion etc. But juxtaposes this by presenting them in a light-hearted manner, with wacky, cartoonish creatures, intended for children and teenagers.


The player starts by creating what their race of monsters will look like. ‘Create a Creature’ is a big part of the attraction of ‘Spore’.  The tools available to the player are overwhelming, and the sheer amount of manipulation is astonishing and very simple to utilize.  In fact Create a Creature’ was given out by the makers as a ‘free-to-download’ feature. Once the player has constructed a monster, their creation begins as a tiny, microscopic organism in a sea. This is known as the ‘cell stage’. The player controls one organism, with the goal to grow bigger, whilst avoiding the larger, predatory creatures that populate the sea.

Once you reach a certain size, the game moves onto to the second stage, the ‘Creature Stage’. Here, your little beast moves onto land for the first time, and goes about basic animal instincts, i.e. eating, breeding, running away from predators etc.

The third stage acts as a very basic sort of RTS game. This stage is known as the ‘Tribal’ stage. With the player now controlling a small tribe of the same creatures, who wield rudimentary tools and weapons. You can either befriend the other tribes that inhabit the world, and greet them with either peace or war.

The next stage is the ‘Civilization’ stage. This is were you are in charge of multiple cities, and can engage in larger scale warfare, with tanks and planes. Again, the powerful and easy-to-learn creation tools of Spore come into they’re own here. The player can customise their vehicles and buildings to match the aesthetics of their race. The focus in the ‘Civilization’ stage is global domination.

Once the player has conquered/ unified their own planet, they progress onto the game’s last stage; the ‘Space’ stage. Once again, the player has the opportunity to create their own kind of object; a spacecraft, with which to explore the galaxy. The gameplay shifts to colonising and terraforming other worlds for your species. To counter-balance the monumental task of running a galactic empire, ‘Spore’ concentrates the player’s actions onto a single ship, rather than try to look at the whole galaxy. You can zoom around space, discovering new, intelligent life, and then interact with it. This could either be peace, diplomacy, trade, or conversely, it could be the global extermination of an alien species. The point is that the game leaves the decision up to you.

‘Spore’ is very ambitious, in its attempt to create a game, which encompasses the whole evolutionary chain. I admire ‘Spore’ for it’s original concept, it’s aspiration and it’s marvellous customisation tools. However, I do feel that each of the individual stages of ‘Spore’ seem rather watered down, and a bit weak. The only exception to this is the final ‘Space’ stage. I thought there was enough to do in this final phase to foster a wholesome, game-playing experience, but unfortunately this was the only case. Taken together, the separate stages of ‘Spore’ work well, although it feels impossible to escape the simple nature of each stage individually. 

'Spore's impressive 'create-a-creature' tool