Reviews VideoGame / Spore

All about your expectations

I played Spore as possibly the first "serious" game in my life as a kid, and it was awesome. The Cell stage introduces you to the concept of creating in a simple 2D environment, you get to collect a few bonuses, but it is really simple and there is little tutorialling needed. The Creature stage introduces you to unit management with your pack members, which then becomes more complex in the following stages, together with more abstract currencies with more uses. The only problem is that once you get into space, there just is not enough content to justify the massive galaxy, and the game gets repetitive fast. Analogously, once you just want to mess around with the editor, the part limits are annoying (and pointless).

The lore, though again not super complex, is charming and has the potential to be a different take on sci-fi, much like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was also very nicely localised, with part names for buildings and vehicles in Czech being a delight of their own. The art style for each stage is consistent and feels like a living world despite (or maybe thanks to) not being excessively detailed. The "objectives" are not that difficult and there is no grand strategy, but just wandering the world and improvising is fun enough. I even still own the manual for the worldbuilding and nostalgia.

From what I've read in other reviews (on this site and elsewhere), the problem most people have with Spore is excessive hype for something that never happened. But if you are spared the hype, or if you are looking for a good introductory game for a non-gamer, the Spore we got may even be better that the Spore that could have been. And it certainly is better for the image of gaming than your average space military simulator.