i probably played this game for close to 500 hours when i was ~11 years old. probably my first singular obsession as a game. this was, for me, what minecraft would be for the next generation.
it's pretty bad.
i don't know that there's another game that shot for the same level of ambition as this, trying to do a simulation of a species starting at cellular life and going up through star trek times. the way they achieved that lofty goal was by basically not having it be a simulation whatsoever. spore is six glorified minigames loosely stitched together with almost no connective tissue between them.
the hook, for both the devs and the player base i imagine, was the Creature Creator, which lets you mold automata from flesh and bone. As a standalone tool, it's the best part of the game, with really rigorous rigging and animation tech to keep things feeling dynamic and responsive to your designs.
unfortunately, this creator is only ever relevant to the creature stage, where creature parts must be individually unlock at complete random on every individual playthrough. While the standalone creator allows for a variety of designs, the actual core gameplay experience demands building a strange lumpy beast composed of optimized parts with no aesthetic.
after the creature stage, the creator downgrades from being "partially relevant" to "completely irrelevant", as every other part of the game will play entirely identically regardless of your creature's physiology. the remainder of spore is a paper-thin tribe-based rts, a paper-thin city-based rts, culminating in a glacially paced space exploration game that locks technology upgrades behind an achievement system that demands an insane amount of repetitive busywork to unlock anything, all in service of cruising around the stars meeting visually-different functionally-identical spacefaring empires, only differing in flavor text and opinion bonuses.
it fails entirely in functioning as a cohesive game, but unfortunately it's infected my childhood brain so thoroughly that deep down, i'm still waiting for someone to take a fresh shot at the same concept. there's individual games that scratch the itch of every individual stage, but nothing else that tries to rope them all together into the same kind of cohesive mega-game, but one where all the moving parts actually meaningfully connect and affect each other.
it's pretty bad.
i don't know that there's another game that shot for the same level of ambition as this, trying to do a simulation of a species starting at cellular life and going up through star trek times. the way they achieved that lofty goal was by basically not having it be a simulation whatsoever. spore is six glorified minigames loosely stitched together with almost no connective tissue between them.
the hook, for both the devs and the player base i imagine, was the Creature Creator, which lets you mold automata from flesh and bone. As a standalone tool, it's the best part of the game, with really rigorous rigging and animation tech to keep things feeling dynamic and responsive to your designs.
unfortunately, this creator is only ever relevant to the creature stage, where creature parts must be individually unlock at complete random on every individual playthrough. While the standalone creator allows for a variety of designs, the actual core gameplay experience demands building a strange lumpy beast composed of optimized parts with no aesthetic.
after the creature stage, the creator downgrades from being "partially relevant" to "completely irrelevant", as every other part of the game will play entirely identically regardless of your creature's physiology. the remainder of spore is a paper-thin tribe-based rts, a paper-thin city-based rts, culminating in a glacially paced space exploration game that locks technology upgrades behind an achievement system that demands an insane amount of repetitive busywork to unlock anything, all in service of cruising around the stars meeting visually-different functionally-identical spacefaring empires, only differing in flavor text and opinion bonuses.
it fails entirely in functioning as a cohesive game, but unfortunately it's infected my childhood brain so thoroughly that deep down, i'm still waiting for someone to take a fresh shot at the same concept. there's individual games that scratch the itch of every individual stage, but nothing else that tries to rope them all together into the same kind of cohesive mega-game, but one where all the moving parts actually meaningfully connect and affect each other.