Spore: My Time in the Gene Pool

One of the many dangers that comes with taking a long time to develop a game is that the story of the game's development becomes more interesting than the game itself. Spore first came to light way back in 2005 and would probably make for an exciting tale of ambition and huge budgets. But it's a bit easier to forget the long road Spore has taken to stores now that I have a copy of it for myself. While Brad is currently playing it in much more depth for our review, I finally got around to playing a couple hours of it last night. It seems fun almost immediately, but so far I'm a little startled by what Spore is and how Spore works.

The game starts out simply enough at the cellular level. You pick a planet, name it, decide if you want to be a carnivore or an herbivore, and then watch as a meteor crashes into the planet. Life springs forth from the meteor in the form of you--a cellular organism.

The first stage is mostly about clicking on meteor chunks to eat them. This fills a bar at the bottom of the screen. As you eat, you also grow bigger, and a Katamari Damacy-like change in the scale of the world occurs every time you go up a size. If you're a meat-eater, you can also attack and eat other creatures, some of which have unlockable parts that you can use. At any time, you can sound a mating call to go into the editor, which is effectively the Creature Creator in full-game form. You can spend your DNA points to slap on additional items, such as spiked horns to defend against incoming attackers, flagella for extra propulsion, and so on. You can also remove items and sell them back at the same cost you paid--this means you're able to mess around as much as you want with all the different parts with no penalty. You can also die without fear, as you'll just reappear as another member of your species.

Over the course of the cellular stage, my carnivore got a pair of spikes, an electrical charge that shocks nearby opponents, and a jet-like propulsion system. But after 30 minutes or so, it was time to rise up out of the ooze and take to the land. You can stick around in the cellular stage for as long as you like, but once you've reached a certain size and filled the DNA meter at the bottom of the screen, you stop earning more currency to further customize your creature.

The second stage is the land stage, so the first thing I did was slap some legs on my guy. Like the previous stage, you can hit the mating call button at any time to drop into the editor and mess around. But the gameplay here is pretty different. You start out in a nest full of your species. There are other species roaming around their own nests, and it's up to you to explore. As a carnivore, I explored by fighting and eating many of the other creatures. If you go in and clear out a few creatures, you'll make the entire species extinct.

The fighting itself has an MMORPG-like quality to it in that you're mostly using hotkeys. Depending on which parts are on your creature, you may have a basic strike attack, a bite, or something a little more complex, like a charge that rushes faraway foes and stuns them. Each attack is mapped to a number key on the keyboard, and each one has a different cooldown time. It's pretty simple.

But it isn't all violence. You can switch out of your aggressive stance and into a social one, which lets you get close and attempt to impress other species. If you impress a set number of creatures, that species will become one of your allies. So far, the only thing I've needed to do to impress other creatures is to sing with them. Eventually you encounter better singers, so you'll probably need to team up with your allies for a full-on group session. As you fill the DNA bar in this stage, your brain gets bigger and you eventually gain the ability to recruit allies. They'll follow you around and help out with fights and singing.

That's about as far as much as I've seen so far. The DNA bar for this stage is around halfway full, so there's still more to see before moving on. The thing that really surprises me, though, is the game's approach to evolution. I sort of figured that my creature would change in accordance with my play style, so if I decided to fight a lot, I'd eventually get a meaner, tougher, battle-tested creature. Or if I decided to be really friendly, maybe I'd end up becoming an herbivore or something. Instead, I chose carnivore very early in the game, and now if I run up and click on a tree, the game says that, as a carnivore, I shouldn't be eating plants.

You get to dictate every aspect of your creature manually, yet you also seem to get locked into some of your early choices. Not to get into some kind of ridiculous debate here, but that's way more intelligent design that I expected. It's definitely interesting enough to keep me going, though. We'll have a full review next week.