Spore

A few weeks ago I told you a little about Will Wright’s latest project – Spore. If the idea of such a boundless sandbox intrigued you, you’d be delighted to learn that the game manages to deliver the goods. For those wearing a blank expression, here’s the lowdown: in Spore, you play God. You start the game with a cinematic of a meteor crashing into a lifeless ocean, bringing with it a microcellular organism. You can design this organism to look any way you want, and watch over it as it evolves (under your strict supervision) from an invertebrate to a complete warmongering, bloodthirsty civilization, that travels around the galaxy annihilating other civilization for your sadistic pleasure.

The game is crafted carefully into five different stages – the Cell Stage, the Creature Stage, the Tribal Stage, the Civilization Stage, and the Space Stage. It’s filled with a load of powerful, intuitive editors, that allow you to do everything from customizing your creature at different stages of its life to designing a town hall for its Civilization Stage, or an entire planet during its Space Stage. These editors play the biggest part in Spore, since the game depends majorly on user-generated content. Everything you create, be it a single-celled organism or a spaceship for the Space Stage, gets uploaded on to the Spore server to be shared with others. So eventually when you play the game, you’ll have the bizarre creations of others populate your game world at different stages. With so many custom created avatars out there, no two players’ experiences will ever be the same!

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Let me tell you a little about the different stages now. The Cell Stage is where you get introduced to your first editor, one that shows you the ropes by helping you design a very basic microcellular organism. This stage plays out a lot like the game ‘flOw’, where you swim around the ocean eating other creatures, absorbing their DNA and evolving slowly. To reach the ocean’s surface, you have to eat your way through an array of majestic invertebrates and eventually grow a set of limbs. You walk on to land then, and start the second stage.

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The Creature Stage gives you a taste of your first full-fledged editor. With its first breath of fresh air, you gift your little creature with a set of legs and a few body parts that help boost different aspects such as its speed or attack power. This is where the seeds of your creature’s personality are sown, as you decide whether your creature should be an herbivore, an omnivore or a carnivore. I took the carnivorous path (I hate veggies), killed all the other creatures around me and ate them (and their babies!) to absorb their DNA. After every few nests I decimated, and the more DNA I absorbed, the more of a sentient being I became – until eventually I banded many of my kind together and formed a tribe.

The Tribal Stage is where the strategic side of the game comes into play for the first time; unlike the first two stages, you control more than just one creature. You form a small tribal settlement, and just like any other strategy game you gather resources and begin to expand. Gathering resources basically meant killing the fauna around my settlement, and using a few of my minions (whom I lovingly named DiabloJr) to collect their meat, or go alternatively go fishing. With enough food – which is the currency of the game at this stage – I banded together a sizable force to lock myself into battle with the nearest tribe. While I took the more hostile path, you can actually go about this stage in a more social way. You can develop musical instruments instead of weapons and charm your way into the hearts of other tribes to make them your allies. I preferred to beat the living crap out of the enemy, making my species more war-inclined. After destroying a couple of settlements, I moved on to the next stage.

The Civilization Stage occurs once your species has dominated the planet. Other species become fauna, while different sects of your own kind begin to start their own cities. It’s your job to unite your species, either by diplomacy, under a religious zeal, or by force. This stage is where you get to design your basic city and, interestingly, your first vehicles! You start off designing a basic land vehicle that helps you capture Spice Nodes (Spice is the currency at this stage of the game) or attack enemy cities. You can either attack enemy cities or be diplomatic and form alliances. Eventually, after all the other cities are either allies or decimated, you move to the Space Stage.

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With your species’ focus off war or diplomacy, they can make the time to research spacefaring technology and you get your first spacecraft in this stage. This is where the fun begins. You gain the ability to travel between systems, and can land on planets and scan their flora and fauna. When you encounter Terraform-able planets, you can set up outposts on them to help expand your empire. As and when you encounter planets inhabited by other sentient species, you can either wage war, seal economic pacts and trade routes, or form diplomatic alliances, depending on the way you want your empire to grow. The number of options at this stage is truly tremendous, and the game’s sandboxing actually reaches its zenith at this point.

You can spend your time doing quests for different species, in order to win them over as allies, or you can just obliterate anything that crosses your path. The best part is that the scale of the sandbox you get access to is humongous, as you have thousands of planets to explore and each one of them with a different species to interact with!

There’s no doubt that Spore is a tremendous achievement with regard to both concept and implementation, but it falters a little technically. The game crashed on me about six times, and I also encountered a bug that made the game pause interminably, forcing me to reload my last saved game. Besides this, Spore tends to get a little repetitive during the Tribal and Civilization Stages, making the game monotonous and less fun. Also, using so many editors throughout the game can spoil the fun if you’re not feeling too creative, since it tends to break the pace more often that you’d like.

Despite that, Spore is an amazing title for those who are oozing creativity, since it lets you exercise it to its fullest. Beyond that, it’s just a question of whether you like such open-ended sandbox/god games or not. I for one had a great time with Spore for the most part, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to play a game that’s truly unique at a fundamental level. The game’s available at most major game retailers for Rs 999, so if you wish to give it a shot it shouldn’t be much of a problem.