I arrived bright and early at my local video game retailer Sunday morning to pick up a copy of Spore, Will Wright's new evolution simulation game, and it was a good thing I did. The clerk reported that he had opened his doors only half an hour earlier to a line-up of eager beavers waiting to get their mitts on what is probably the most highly anticipated PC release of the year, and he had only a couple of copies left.
I selected the special edition version—I'm a sucker for making-of features and production art booklets—and headed straight home. Then, over the course of the afternoon and early evening, I played through the entire game...and ended up disappointed.
Spore is a jack of all games and a master of none. It's comprised of five discrete stages, each of which corresponds to a different phase of a creature's evolution. The first stage is a straightforward, arcade-like game in which simple celled organisms swim through a boundless primordial soup looking for food and avoiding predators, while the final stage has us tooling around the galaxy, colonizing planets and harvesting a valuable mineral known as spice.
The problem is that these stages are either too rudimentary and repetitive or feel like inferior versions of better games. The fourth stage, for example, which sees our creatures building cities and trying to take over the globe through military, religious, or economic means, is essentially a dumbed down version of Sid Meier's Civilization games.
The one place in which Spore outshines any other game I've seen is in customization. Players have godlike control over the shapes and abilities of not only their creatures but their civilization's buildings, military hardware, and even space ships. Indeed, if you're looking for a piece of accessible 3-D modelling software, you could do worse.
These are just my early, undigested thoughts. I'll be playing more over the next day or two and filing a full length review for the Globe and Mail's Personal Tech page. However, I'd be surprised if my opinion changes significantly. Spore is an undeniably ambitious undertaking and a one-of-a-kind creative experience, but the parts of the game that require us to actually play—to strategize, manage, and accomplish objectives—just aren't that compelling.
