Spore

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 5th September 2008
Comments (63) Digg Stumble

Low Society

If the early parts of the game were inspired by The Neverending Story then the middle of the game is probably more inspired by the early music of the floppy-haired and sepia-toned boyband Take That. Which is to say that in the tribal stage everything changes, but you.

Here, things start to get a little more complex and closer to Will Wright's massively successful The Sims. That might be a disappointment to some people who label this game style as the abhorred ‘casual gaming’ stuff they’ve heard about in the doom-saying prophecies of The Forums, but it isn’t all that bad.

Besides, much of the game is unlocked from the start and as you can stay in any one stage for as long as you want before you move on, it's hard to get really annoyed.

In the tribal stage things are getting more organised for your species. You have to start moving away from evolving your creature and more towards designing their culture – are you a barbarian brute in war-masks and nipple rings or are you a cultured diplomatic race in grass skirts and nipple rings? Does it really matter what you do when you’re playing a game with a nipple ring option?

Spore Spore - Tribal Stage

Again, there are only a few goals and most of the choices are limited – do you invade your neighbours or ally with them? Bully them with stone axes and flaming torches, or win them over with musical instruments and a subtle variation on that boring minigame again?

Whichever you do, you better be prepared for things to get more difficult as you have to manage your growing pack. Here the gameplay is starting to get more taxing, though it’s still easily within reach of even casual gamers provided they can multitask a little and keep one group hunting for food while the other socialises, pausing occasionally to pump new babies out of the love factory and re-equip everyone for their tasks.

Up to this point in the standard game there’s been a constant feeling of exploration and amazement. You trek across alien territory, looking at aliens created by other people and downloaded to your world remotely. You marvel at the bizarre constructs of these foreign imaginations and boggle at the alien trees. You search out mountains and volcanoes to fly off of if you have wings and you feel the oddly touching twinge of guilt when you render another species utterly extinct.

Then, at the tribal stage, things begin to fall apart both on an artistic and technical level. You start to see that every species around you is essentially the same – they each have identical villages and the same behaviours. There are only a handful of techs to uncover – musical instruments, axes, torches; none of it unique or inspiring. Every race around you is a repainted version of yourself.

Spore Spore - Tribal Stage

At the same time the camera is often awkward to control and your villagers often fly in the face of your command, proving too stubborn to obey your mouse-clicks. It’s times like this when you remember why Dungeon Keeper gave you the ability to backhand your minions. All too often they’ll watch a corpse decompose rather than harvest it automatically, or they'll spend time fighting a grossly superior force instead of gathering the food you need to create more warriors, dooming the battle before it has really begun.

Bundle in all that with the fact that you still can’t really die in the game and the tribal stage quickly becomes apparent as a bit of a grind fest, with defeated players having to go through exactly the same steps over and over again. Kill some wild animals for food with your chieftain, use the food to create babies, have your enlarged tribe harvest more food and use the food the to buy one of the nine possible buildings. Use the equipment to befriend or attack the fellow tribes and then repeat until you fill the meter at the bottom. Rinse, repeat.

It isn’t that the tribal stage is bad per se – there’d be some definite appeal in here if there was a bit more customisation and content available, but as it is the tribal stage is clearly just filler. The creature and cell stages are quick, fun and full of chances to experiment with. The later stages offer more complexity and diversity...but the tribal stage? It’s just trapped in the middle with some control issues plopped on top.

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