Spore (PC) Review

So..the question I left off last week with: Was Spore worth the wait?

I would say no.

Here is why:
It is a cute little game. And it is good at being a cute little game. And I am probably going to buy the retail version of this cute little game when I have the money to buy it. But honestly, the hype was so big, this game didn't live up to it.

The first 4 stages (cell, creature, tribal, and civilization) are all really simple, with having to make a few friends or kill a few cities off in order to progress. I am in the civ stage of my second race, a religous race at the moment. I felt the game was harder with military up until now. I am hoping the space stage is easier with religous, because at the moment, my millitary race gets pwnd as soon as I cannot pay off a rival race. They come and blow up my outposts, and that is it. All that wasted money for nothing.

Also, I thought the tools to resurface and repopulate a planet were perminant things once you learned how to use them. To my dismay, I have to buy an atmosphere generator or buy a meteor shower useage. That is lame. They are not cheap either. You start the space stage with less than 1 atmosphere generators amount of money. That isn't a very good sentence, so i'll quantitate: You start with 100,000, and atmosphere generators are 150,000. At that is just to pump some air in, you may not even get the planet to a habitable state with 1! Exploring the planets for relics and new paints for my planet painter are fun I guess, but the energy supply is pretty short, so I constantly have to go to one of my outposts to pay to refill it. And god forbid I roam into enemy territory...they will pwn my entire race within a few short minutes.

I haven't yet completely delved into space stage. I am waiting to do that with my peaceful race. But at the moment, I am a little put off by how much stronger my enemy is compared to me. Also, since the only way to shoot another spaceship is to click on them, and I play on my laptop with a trackpad, imagine how hard it is to shoot down anything! Another problem I have is that Sodoom graced me with a PC copy, and I run a mac, so I have to play the game on my Windows partition of my mac (MacBook double OS FTW). That being said, I need to do wacky things in order to right click, which is needed quite often in the pc version of the game. It is almost like a finger dance to battle spaceships while also not dying from their lasers.

All in all, on a 1-10 scale I would rate this game a 6. It has it's entertaining moments, but is too simple in the begining, and so far, too hard in the end. I can get to space stage from cell in a few hours if I had the time to do it, and then once in space, I get fucked by every alien out there! Oh well. I'm sure Maxis will put out a million expansions that will really flesh out the game more, but for the archtype game that it is, it could have been better.

Overall: 6
Sound : 8
Graphics: 8
Replay: 7

~Tuza