 Great Game, Wrong REGION |
| Review Date: August 13, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Luise Fuzy, Mequon, Wisconsin United States |
Somehow, we ended up with a copy of Spore from -- no, we're not making this up -- Ireland. The documentation was all full of references to VAT taxes, Euros, etc. There was even a number to call if we didn't need the international number, because we were *inside* Ireland.
So, our return had nothing to do with the game, which my 12 year old loves. It has to do with the vendor who picked up a batch of cheap disks from someplace |
One of the greatest gaming ideas ever ended in a total fail...
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| Review Date: August 6, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Rajesh Motie, Foo |
Spore had some of the most potential a game has ever had. It was a game that was to accurately portray evolution and alien life. We all watched the presentations that came from 2005 and 2006 and such. Spore looked amazing, the scope of it, its flexibility, the creativity it would allow, the unexplored regions of gameplay it would expose. A game that lets you take species through different stages of advancement, evolving along the way until they have the opportunity to explore an entire galaxy. Sure, it had its issues, but we'd never seen anything like it. I got giddy thinking about buying Spore, the things we'd be able to do! We were already thinking about the planets, creatures, buildings and vehicles we'd make. I could hardly bare to wait for Spore to come out, I was bursting with excitement.
I actually watched those aforementioned demonstrations during 2008, and I knew that Spore was different now, but I paid that no mind. A copy of Spore came into my possession. I started the game up, and everything went straight to shell. The entire enormous thrill of getting to play Spore was converted into something called epic disappointment. It wasn't realised at first, but it came, slowly but surely.
Why is it that having Spore on your computer is so problematic? My copy of Spore would refuse to start up around seven times until I could finally turn the game on, and then there are the DRM issues, SECUROM issues and the installation/registry limitations. All of this is so frustrating and unnecessary! Spore is just supposed to be a game that requires no disk to play once installed. There are problems with accounts too, the copy of Spore you're using on your computer can only have one master account, it's extremely frustrating and I had to create another screen name so my little brother could save creations under his own mantle.
All of that madness is nothing compared to what I found within the game. There are five stages: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space. You can be good, bad, or neutral during these stages, and that will affect your species in the future, though the results are usually ridiculous. You choose a planet to start life on; this is essentially one of your files. In Spore, you can only start life through the concept of Panspermia. There are other ways for life to begin in this universe, and the fact that only one of them is included in the final game makes it feel totally narrow minded. The developers didn't even include a short explanation of Panspermia in the game, leaving people unfamiliar with the topic either baffled or thinking that the idea makes no sense.
With the Cell Stage comes the choice of herbivore or carnivore, not that cells so early in their evolution could even eat things. In fact, these aren't really cells, they're weird bug things that float around the primordial ooze, munching on microscopic seaweed or hunting each other. They can have jaws, spikes, electric nubs, poison, jets, and can be bulbous or wormy. You of course won't start off with many parts at all, but instead of unlocking more biologically advanced parts through your species existing for a longer amount of time, you just go around finding parts to add to your collection. You can mate with another bug thing to go into the cell editor, change up the species, and fast forward millions of years. It's ludicrous, cells don't have these kinds of parts and they don't mate! So instead of letting you make your own cell species, you're forced to mess around with micro bugs.
Next you would go into some kind of aquatic stage, right? No, you go straight to land. The "cells" are suddenly large creatures that decide to make their way above. No, there is no option to stay underwater. While you're on land you can eventually become avian, right? No, but you can evolve wings to glide for short periods of time. You're in the Creature Stage, a bizarrely named phase (you never stop being a creature, do you?) where you've got to go through the same old song and dance (literally) or just kill and eat. Again, you have to find random parts, and while you will be able to get omnivorous parts, if you were a carnivore in the Cell Stage, you can't find herbivorous parts, and vice versa, which is excruciatingly annoying. In Spore, species evolve because they feel like it, not because of natural selection, not because of environmental change, nothing like that. Evolution is not accurately portrayed here, accuracy could have easily been incorporated, but it wasn't. And it really doesn't matter what your creature is like, it's all about stats. Your species could have ten legs, and yet another with only one leg might be able to go faster simply because of its stats. No matter how cool or reasonable a certain part may look, if its stats are too low, you could be hard pressed trying to beat the Creature Stage.
Following the Creature Stage is the Tribal Stage. You get one last chance to evolve, and then certain species on the planet have gained sentience and have formed tribes. It's a watered down real time strategy game that excels in repetition. There aren't any social sandbox tools like I thought there were going to be, it's simple repeating of actions with boring down time. Plus, the world is quite boring, all creatures hang around in their own clumps, never journeying anywhere. You won't see them interacting with new creatures, grazing, foraging, mating, nothing, they fumble around with their own kind.
For some reason, when you enter the Civilization Stage, all other sentient species have disappeared. You might not have chosen to drive them extinct in the Tribal Stage, but they're still gone. So now the world is populated by other nations of your kind, and depending on your choices in the previous stages, you'll have access to either religious, economic, or military resources. This is pretty limiting, and you have to carry out the same actions over and over again. Curiously, you have to mine "spice" from spice geysers to gain currency. Weird, it's like Frank Herbert's Dune. The Civilization Stage is a painful RTS that has you mining resources and clicking "create vehicle", it's mind numbing.
Finally, we reach the pinnacle of existence, the goal on everyone's mind, it's what you've been waiting for, this is what it's always been about, and you've been lead to this, prepared for it, excited for it, ready to explore every nook and cranny of it. And sadly, it sucks. I'm talking about the last stage in the game, the Space Stage. Navigation is done by means of a single spacecraft, and an entire galaxy is at your disposal. Unfortunately, many alien empires will try as hard as they can to kill you for no apparent reason, valuable resources are impossibly expensive, missions are redundant and boring, it's tedious to fly back and forth between far apart locations, any worlds you do own will be plagued by eco-disasters and alien raids, and you can't even leave your spaceship. With all these problems, how are you ever supposed to take on the Grox, make it to the center of the galaxy, talk to Steve, and obtain the Staff of Life? You can never focus on anything you might want to do, like terraforming, colonizing, or diplomacy, because there are so many preposterous problems being thrown at you all at once. I thought I was going to go fanatical with glee editing every planet I saw, no such luck. I thought I was going to unite the galaxy with my own version of the PAN Galactic Alliance, not a chance. I thought I'd be witnessing all sorts of interstellar phenomena, like star shells, supernovae, and nebulae, but these things are scarce or nowhere to be found at all.
Of course, Spore does have things going for it. Its creation tools are, for the most part, pretty awesome. There are lots of things to create, Creatures, Buildings, Vehicles, Spaceships. We could do without the complexity meter, and it would be a lot better if creatures could have hair. I also mostly like how sharing with the community is integrated and made easy. It's made quite simple to find things in the Sporepedia, and Sporecasts are a great idea. Interacting with the online community and creating things are the fun parts of Spore.
Spore is a jack of all trades, master of none. It's the sum of its parts. It didn't live up to the years of hype. There are glimmers of awesomeness in this game, but they are more often than not overshadowed by the mediocrity that it emits. 4/10 |
Completely dumbed down and cartoony
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| Review Date: July 27, 2010 |
| Reviewer: AHelioD, |
Far far far from the original concept and vision of the game. Completely dumbed down and linear, creature creator is only good for asthetics and doesnt effect anything else other then body part attributes (shape doesnt matter).
BAD! |
BSODs Galore
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| Review Date: July 20, 2010 |
| Reviewer: V. Daniel Ziemecki, Atlanta GA USA |
My wife and son bought this against my recommendation. Game play aside, I knew from the reviews that it would be a challenge just to make this thing run. And I will be having my "I-Told-You-So" moments, shortly.
I've spent hours trying to make thing thing work for my disappointed kid. I got past the first hurdle when I discovered that there was a conflict with the way the game phoned home, and the way K-9 allowed access to the internet for minors. After disabling K-9 just to get the game activated, it seemed to run pretty well. For a day.
The next day, it Blue Screened every time we launched it. I tried updating the video driver, playing with compatibility modes, and launching as an administrator. We tried installing the 1.05 patch (which, humorously, wanted you to be running first to download it). Nothing worked.
This is not some exotic system we're using. Windows 7 with an Intel chip and an nVidia graphics card. If it can't run on this, I can't imagine what it was designed for.
I'm sure there is some collection of drivers and patches that'll make this work. If not, there wouldn't be some many reviews about the unimaginative game-play. But I've gone past the amount of effort I'm going to put into a game. And the rest of my family has learned a lot about buying DRM riddled garbage from EA. |
AWESOME!!!
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| Review Date: July 10, 2010 |
| Reviewer: , |
Spore is a five star game. You get to create your own creature- from a one-cell organism to creatures like us. It's the best ever!!!
Anonymous, age 9
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Tis A Shame
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| Review Date: June 29, 2010 |
| Reviewer: default_gamer, |
| Remember when you could just buy PC games, install them on your computers, and just be happy with them? Well, sorry! Big gaming industries instead decided to make it utter hell to try to install and play a game that you legitimately bought. 10 years of game development went straight down the toilet for EA. Which is really sad, because I wanted to play this. I never did get it because of all these horror stories, yet I gave it 4 stars for fun because, from the gaming videos I've seen, it looks like the kind of thing you'd play every once in a while. I was distraught by the security garbage that was incorporated into playing Empire: Total War, so I think I can have some empathy in losing $50. I'm not surprised by how far down the price for Spore has gone. Even in Best Buy, it's maybe 1/3 of the price it once was. EA has mentioned that they will remove much of the security issues, but it probably won't be enough. Will the PC gaming industry crumble from pirating? I'm not sure if that's true because I don't know the environment of developers vs. pirates and how catastrophic it can be. I do know that new PC games incorporating a sickeningly heavy amount of restrictions on installation and whatnot and infiltrating one's system with checks to see if they're a pirate makes pirates look like heroes. Perhaps the game will soon be released free of all locks and chains. Maybe not. I just hope that PC game developers look at why customers rage against the games: drm and tight security. |
PEGI?
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| Review Date: June 25, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Unknownguy801, Texas,USA |
| Let me make one thing clear, I Love this game. The only reason i have given this one a 3* Rating is because it is not the American version. Its the Galactic edition Alright but the packaging is not the same as the picture. its the European version of the game and is Rated by the PEGI, which isn't a bad thing in itself but the box this comes is is hardly a box worth having when you want the special edition. Its a big box and all the stuff they promised is just thrown in there. but its cheaper than the regular edition so i would say buy it, but just be cautioned if you are looking for that awesome case. |
Pretty Pictures
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| Review Date: June 22, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Benjamin P. W. Hamilton, Portland, Oregon |
| The registar code key didn't work, as in invalid or already used so couldn't use the online feature. Sucks. Games okay, pretty, but not what you'd call a real challenge of any sort. This is a game for kids, like maybe 10 or so... my 15 year old was bored after playing it twice. Pretty, some good ideas, but it's setting gathering dust on our shelf after just a week.... |
Another one-star review because of DRM.
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| Review Date: June 14, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Immoli, |
So I bought this game completely ignorant of DRM. Now that I understand what it is I feel compelled to join with the others and warn people (thought it may be a late warning) about this game.
If you buy this game you will also get what amounts to a virus put on your computer that cannot be removed save reformating. It can mess with hardware, opens a backdoor, blah blah. Read the other reviews, I don't see the point in repeating everything they've said.
Just avoid this game. |
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| Review Date: May 13, 2010 |
| Reviewer: stokes, ca |
game freezes up all the time even with patches threw in trash .will never buy from this company again. if your going to sell something make shure it works , get bugs out before you
sell it. i will continue to buy from amazon this is not their fault. |
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