Spore

Spore, so I went down to GAME yesterday morning to buy Spore on release day.

I have been looking forward to spore for ages.... and to be honest I am a bit disappointed.

It started off awesome, developing through the stages was fun and exciting acquiring DNA points and spending them to make yourself better. I have played the beginning stages twice, once as vicious and aggressive carnivore, and then again as gentle soft and cuddly omnivore. Both were fun in different ways, but both very similar, instead of ferociously building things to destroy something you ferociously build things to trade with something.

The space stage was very repetitive and required far to much micro-management, was way to awkward and took far to long to change viewpoints all of which became very frustrating very quickly. And seriously, only one ship? You can get more donated by your allies as the game progresses but they just follow you around and help out a bit. I want several (at least) ships that I can leave places to look after things, so that I can go exploring without having to race back to solve problems every 2 mins. You may get more ships as you travel through the game, but I don't know if I can put up with it for that long.

For a more thought out and better written review read this. I agree with it completely.

It was good and I will play it some more, I want to reach the galactic center, but in a few months/years time and I feel and urge to create a civilization and see it grow over time I think i will always reach for Sim-City 3000.

Things I wanted / expected from spore:

• The Cell stage to be longer (could be optional), there were bigger and better creatures than me when I "chose" to evolve legs, but when the option to evolve was given no matter how much I ate I collected no more DNA points s could not get bigger/better/stronger.

• The triabal stage to be a lot longer, more complex and more like Age of Empires in general.

• The city stage to be a lot longer, more complex more options for buildings, better control for the military/economic options, more options over all really, and in general a cross between Sim City and Red Alert

Notice a pattern? The game was good, but when you break it down into individual stages there are games that are better. Spore should have been at least as good as all the individual games but then linked them together, but it just is not.