75 out of 98(77%)reviewers recommend this product.
Product Reviews
Overall rating
3/ 5
Gameplay
3/ 5
Graphics
4/ 5
Sound
4/ 5
Connacht
The Good and the Bad
PostedSeptember 16, 2008
When Will Wright gave his initial presentation of Spore, I completely believed that this game would break the mold and challenge other game companies to do the same. Unfortunately Electronic Arts had their infamous way with Spore, and the game came out half baked and targeted towards kids. The game is divided into five game worlds: Cellular, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space The Microscopic stage lasts for about 20 minutes depending on your gameplay style, but can last as little as 5 minutes if you know what you're doing. This stage is probably the most fun part of the game because it's cute, but brutal at the same time. Once the player reaches the "creature" stage, the game quickly begins to go down hill. You either wipe out or make friends with other species, ultimately working towards different creature traits that give you unique abilities. The limitation of attacking or making friends with other creatures makes this stage monotonous. It should also be noted that in this stage, you will make your creature's final appearance based off a large number of different "parts". This is where the game shines through. The customization of creatures is well done and brilliant. However, there's nothing evolutionary about this game. It's entirely creationism on the part of the player. Your creature does not adapt by themselves, nor does changing their appearance really effect the ability of the creature to survive in the game world. If you have a mouth, arms, eyes, and legs, your creature will function. The placement of parts means nothing to the game, another disappointment. Once the player reaches the tribal stage, the options are the same as the creature stage. Either make friends or kill the other tribes. This takes about 20 to 30 minutes, and makes little sense because it implies that other creatures on your planet are sentient, though you will never hear from these tribal civilizations again in future stages. The civilization stage takes planets to the global level and tasks them with unifying the planet, either through force, economics, or religion. Force is the funnest, but economics is the easiest. Again, your actions will effect your final space trait, which can either be beneficial or totally useless. Once the planet if unified, you move to the space stage. At the galaxy level, you will be overwhelmed. There must be hundreds of thousands of stars, if not millions, in your galaxy. All are visitable, and most have planets to colonize. You can even use black holes as wormholes with the right technology. Unfortunately as magnificent as the game looks at the space stage, it's here at this point that the game fails miserably. The failings of the other stages could be forgiven if the space stage were better done, as the whole point of the game is to create a creature that will become the master of its galaxy, or at least the master of a sizable area of it. The Galaxy looks very well done and there are many different types of stars to explore. However the player quickly discovers numerous problems. Your empire furnishes you with one space ship. Just one. And you need this ship to do anything and everything. Your ship must be present in a star system to do anything. You cannot look at, make changes, or do anything to your colonies without your space ship present. This is made infinitely worse by the fact that in order to make money in this game, you must use your ship to collect a substance called "spice" from your colonies to sell to other empires or sometimes your own colonies if you can. Unlike in the civilization stage, you do not automatically generate money, but have to get it from selling spice. This means that the player must visit each individual colony (and that means scrolling in and out of the solar system view and back to the galaxy view which by itself is tedious and takes time) to collect spice and then to sell it, which means finding a good price somewhere. There's no way to te
Overall rating
3/ 5
Gameplay
4/ 5
Graphics
4/ 5
Sound
4/ 5
donald1941
Frequent Game Crash
PostedSeptember 16, 2008
The game is fun. It is quirky and humorous, although the early stages are rather simplistic. I understand this was deliberate in the development of the game. As a player progresses to a higher level, it becomes more complex but never to the point of having to go back and repeat again and again just to advance. However, when one gets to the Space section one runs into a problem. There seems to be some issues that cause frequent crashes, even on high end machines. It seems to be a problem encountered by many, not just one or two. The various SPORE forums are full of questions concerning this problem. EA hopefully is working on the problem and will issue a patch very soon. Until then, it is a headache. If one plays the game at the Space level it requires the player to SAVE almost at each play to prevent the crash. Until a patch fixing this problem is issued the game is imperfect and frustrating at that level, which, by the way is the most fun and varied of all the stages.
0 of 1 found this review helpful.
Overall rating
5/ 5
Gameplay
4/ 5
Graphics
4/ 5
Sound
4/ 5
Snowboardking19
Creativity Abounds
PostedSeptember 16, 2008
Really, spore is like 5 games in one. All the five games are simple rip offs of many other games. Cell Stage is obviously Feeding Frenzy, Creature stage has hints of World of Warcraft, Tribe Stage is like Command and Conquer, City Stage is like Civilization, and Space Stage is like Alpha Centauri. All of the games Spore "barrows" ideas from are better than Spore in themselves, so why buy a game that is simply a 5-in-1 knock off? The true greatness of Spore is the ability to use your imagination. At each stage you are allowed to create creatures, cells, vehicles, buildings, etc to the limits of your imagination. The brilliance of the game is not the control scheme or the cool powers, but rather spending hours creating your Fish-Frog-Centi-Monkey and watching it interact with some Turtle-Teletubby-Gremlin that someone else made. You can download creations from other players over the internet instantly to give the game a great sense of variety. I am usually a fan of First-Person shooters, action adventures, racing, and sports. However, I spent at least 3 hours making a military boat that looked like a frog with lazer eyes and rocket boosters. The game somehow reminds me of playing with Legos or even Play-doh as a very young child, only when my play-doh creation is complete, it runs and spits poison at other monsters. If you ever played the Sims, the charm of that game was interacting socially, but I always had the most fun building mansions and trying to get the Sims to look like real people. This game is just as brilliant and allows you to create any type of animal you could ever have imagined. The 5 games in 1 are really just to let you see what your cell/animal/city/spaceship can do when it animates. I do not believe that everyone will love this game, but if you appreciate innovative games as works of art, Will Wright knocked this one out of the ball park. You will not be disappointed if you simply play this game with an open mind and give it a fair shot. The game captures how much fun God would have had making all the animals in the universe.
Overall rating
5/ 5
Gameplay
4/ 5
Graphics
5/ 5
Sound
4/ 5
Stryider
Good Game! DON"T LISTEN TO THE ONES THAT PUT THIS GAME DONW!!
PostedSeptember 15, 2008
This game is a GREAT game! DON"T LISTEN TO THE FULLS THAT PUT THIS GAME DOWN!! This game lets you do many things, and it will make you want to come back time after time . the people that put this game down, that I have read, just don't know what FUN is!! If you like games, like the Sims, Sim City and know that thoes game's are great then this is your type of game for you!, I think they need to make more games like this!! A MUST BUY!!! This game will let you make your own type of spore, any way you like! then in time your spore then can walk on land, then you will be able to build all types of things.. The game runs great in Vista, you can also in the game upload your spore, or download others. you can also download ad-ons. I don't understand why they don't make more games like this.. maybe its because its not one of them lame 1st person shooters. Take my word for it this game is FUN!!!
