Somebody mentioned to me that they were wondering whether Spore was worth picking up, but they couldn't find a review that wasn't overwhelmingly about the "digital rights/restrictions management" (DRM) that Spore uses. Now that I've run two distinct races from cell stage into the space stage (that's my Foosbeast from late civilization days to the left), I think I know enough to give a review a shot.
So, let's get the distasteful bits out of the way right off... first, it's distributed by Electronic Arts (EA). I'm pretty sure that this is the first game I've purchased from them since the days of Ultima Online, when I swore off EA after seeing how shabbily they treated some military members in their test programs. Not that keeping away from EA has been all that hard... the company that started out as a gathering of game programmers that pursued unique and entertaining ideas (Starflight comes to mind) has devolved into a corporation that is loathe to take on any risk, content instead to crank out endless revamps of sports titles and Sims properties. If this game had been proposed by anybody other than the original creator of all the SimMadness, EA wouldn't have touched it with a 10' pole.
But EA did take on the game... however, being the consumer-fearing types that they are, they have locked down the game as rigidly as they dare (they were going to be even more draconian, but community outrage made them scale back... but that's a story for another time). The current DRM scheme makes you register an account with the central office and tie your copy of the game to that account... it's a minor annoyance that's offset by allowing you access to the many creations that people are constantly coming up with, so, in and of itself, it's tolerable. One interesting side effect that doesn't affect me, but that you might care about... apparently, this linking of account to game means that you can only have one account for your registered game, even though the printed manual says otherwise (EA, if I recall properly, is calling it a "misprint"). If you want to have your batch of critters, and your roommate/SO wants their own corral, you'll have to buy another copy, as things stand right now.
OK, with that out of the way, let's get to the game... or rather, let's get to the toy. If you go into Spore thinking it's going to be five great games all rolled into one, you're going to be sadly disappointed. The best way I can think of to describe the whole is a couple of 'casual' games to help you with the creative process for your creatures, a couple of forgettable 'real-time strategy' (RTS) games to give you an excuse to play dress-up with your creatures and build some cars and houses for them (in all fairness, I'm no fan of RTS, so keep that in mind when we get there), and a HUGE space-exploration game to round out the whole. As much as anything, the first four games act as tutorials for later games... except that some of the rules/controls of earlier games change radically, so not so much.
Taking things in order, the game begins with the "cell" phase. Gameplay is simplicity itself... float around a 'flat' world, eat what you like eating, and don't get killed too often. As beasties die in the tidepool around you, sometimes they leave behind useful traits that you don't possess yet... snag those, and use some of the "genetic diversity" you've consumed to add/remove bits from your blobbie (as a side note, I can't help but think of Primordial Soup when I play this stage). The more you eat, the more you grow... get big enough, and you can plop some legs on your blobbie and head for land. Personally, I found the mouse to be the simplest control to use for this stage, but your mileage, as always, may vary.
Once on land, you're in the "creature" phase. Your view switches to 3D, but you're still basically running around in a mostly-flat world (you can jump and glide, but there's no "true" flight that I've seen so far). Collect traits to add to your critter from skeletal remains, creatures that you kill, or from befriending other creatures. Combat is very MMO (for better or worse, depending on your point of view), while "socializing" is a weak flavor of Simon Says... and your success at both depends greatly on what parts you've attached to your critter. As you deal with more and more of the surrounding wildlife, your brain grows and grows, until you finally become (at least minimally) sentient. For controls, you can use the mouse to point and click your way... but I found using the WASD keys for running around to be very helpful.
With the discovery of fire (and side note time... there are some very cute cutscenes starring your critters in their current form between stages), you enter the "tribal" phase. Once you have reached this phase, your physical form is locked down, and has little bearing on gameplay from this point forward. Instead, you now get to deal with clothing your critters for style or gameplay advantage... as well as a couple basic technologies to outfit your people with. Your basic currency is food, used to feed your people (duh!), gift to other tribes (right...), and build more people and tool shacks (???). As more creatures evolve to sentience, you need to either make them your allies or exterminate them to gather their technologies and advance. Since you have no "direct" control over any of your people, you're pretty well stuck with using the mouse to control them... although you can use WASD for some basic camera controls, which I found useful.
With all the lesser races subjugated (it's odd... even if you "ally" other tribes, you never seem to see them again...), your people reign supreme... and it's time for the "civilization" phase (side note time again... for all its simplicity, this is probably my favorite cutscene of them all). Clothing no longer has any substantial effect on things... because you're all to civilized to get your hands dirty fighting each other in person. Now, it's time for cars, boats, and (eventually) planes to rule the day... and, you guessed it, how they're outfitted affects their "worth". No need to worry about tracking down all those parts or anything, though... they're all right there for you to use from the get-go. Instead of food, cash is king... used to build vehicles and buildings of your own design (the insanity's reined in a bit here... there are only 4 major types of buildings to build or import, and their design is purely cosmetic). Use economic, religious, or military means to bring the other cities over to your way of thinking, uniting the planet under your rule... and you'll be ready for space. Controls are pretty much identical to the tribal stage.
One thing I glossed over from those prior four stages... how you get past them matters as much as getting past them, because the choices you make strongly influence how the rest of the game plays out. Each stage has three "bands" of "what you're trending towards", usually as two "rail" cases and one you have to work to accomplish. For example, in the cell phase, you start out with either a carnivorous mouth or a filter-feeder (herbivorous) mouth... you can easily eat your way to either extreme, but you have to carefully balance things if you want to raise an omnivore for the creature phase... and I tried it out, little Rhoddy will, in fact, puke if he tries to eat fruit. It's nice that there's an extended influence for your behaviors... but the influence is strong enough that you have to fight hard to overcome it (e.g. as a carnivore, you have to kill to eat... if you kill too many of one nest of critters, you're headed down the path of aggression whether you like it or not. I don't think it's impossible to work all the way back up to loved by enough people to pass by that route, but it sure wouldn't be easy.).
So, that leaves the space game. Early reports said that this was going to be a 4x style game, but it just ain't so. Yes, you can (and will) explore and expand. However, you are not playing the "grand emperor" of your empire in this stage... rather, you are the captain of your ship, period. As you advance, you can add more ships to your armada, but your focus is irrevocably fixed on your current position, your current situation. You can spend on building up colonies and terraforming planets, but only the one your at, if you're close enough to the action and are so inclined to notice. Luckily, you're not responsible for building anything more complex than the cities you built in the civilization phase, or you would quickly go mad trying to keep track of it all.
As is, you could still have some problems keeping track of it all... you go from flying around on planetary surfaces (I found WASD with mouse wheel for altitude works for me) to zooming out to a solar system view (using your mouse to investigate/fly to different planets) to zooming further out to a galaxy view (similar controls to solar system). The galaxy view's probably the "worst" of the lot, because of the sheer number of stars to deal with, and the fact that, while it's a "disc" galaxy, there is some significant thickness to that disc, so two stars can look to be next to each other, while one is much "deeper" than the other in your screen. Personally, I like the look... but it could be just a bit disorienting for somebody who's been coddled along by the prior four games.
So, that's the game... except it's not. Clever monkeys that they are, EA or Maxis included some other features to draw you in... access to all the builders (so you don't have to play the games if you just want to build something), a "social" page on their servers to keep track of your friends and what your creations have done in other peoples' games (and to look up creators to snag other bits from them if you found something you liked earlier), and a "badge" system that gives you little rewards for meeting certain conditions in your game(s), for all the obsessive-compulsives out there. There may be even more, but that's plenty.
Overall, I'm liking my new toy, and expect to get hours of enjoyment from it... especially since they did such a nice job with the behavior/motion modeling on the critters. I wouldn't use this to introduce anybody to computer gaming, certainly, but, especially for builder-types, I think you could do far worse for $50.
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