Spore

Jul 1, 2008

By now you've heard the hype, and likely you've downloaded the standalone Creature Creator and played with the game's surprisingly intuitive and flexible editor. There's no doubt about it: Spore is powered by some unique and impressive technology. Dream up a bizarre creature and the game will figure out how to make it walk, dance, attack and sing on the fly. Combined with an Internet community that's already building a library of insane content, Spore stands in a league of its own.

But gamers are wondering: Is there any game there?

Longtime PC gamers will remember innovative titles like Peter Molyneux's 2001 opus, Black & White. It delivered on its promise of allowing players to raise and interact with an enormous, personality-filled creature, but once the novelty subsided, the actual gameplay was pretty shallow. Will that be the case with Spore? That's what we wondered as we sat down at the controls with a build of the full game. The verdict? From what we've seen so far, the news is good; Spore delivers as much gameplay as it does innovation. You could hardly tear us away from the PC.

Soup Dreams

For our playtest, we decided to start at the very beginning, to see how our creature would grow organically from the humblest of origins. The central conceit of Spore is that the theory of "Panspermia" is true: microbial life forms are floating all around the cosmos and can fall from space to populate a planet. The opening cut-scene depicts an alien meteorite hurtling through our planet's atmosphere, breaking up, and tumbling into the oceans. Pieces of steaming rocks broke apart and dissolved, revealing -- me! A humble organism with a pair of eyes (centered, not bifocal), a mouth, and a pair of flagella to move around with.

A glimpse of the planet as the meteor hit depicted a lush green world with sparkling blue water interspersed by mountainous islands. This would be our last look at the planet as a whole until our species was advanced enough for world domination.

Meanwhile, we focused on the soup. The very first decision you'll make at the beginning of the game is whether you start as a carnivore (eating other microscopic creatures) or herbivore (munching on the tiny plant life scattered around the soup). Later you can always switch it up by changing what type of mouth your creature has. As for us, we stuck it out as a herbivore, which meant avoiding just about every other lifeform on the map (a strategy that impacted the kind of creature we later evolved into).

We discovered that the decisions you make early on impact your species for the rest of the game. Spore builds an evolutionary timeline as you play, much like that famous illustration of walking monkeys growing upright into men carrying spears. The timeline shows every phase of your creature's evolution, as well as the decisions you make at each stage of the game.

During the microbial phase, we could choose our creature's diet based on how we played the game (herbivore, omnivore, carnivore). At the end of this stage, our species was tagged with the "Herbivore" characteristic, which gave our creature special herbivore abilities for every future stage of the game.

Likewise, decisions you make during the creature phase of the game (make friends or fight everyone) will permanently flavor your species, just as your decisions during the civilization part of the game (warfare, diplomacy, etc.) have a permanent impact. At the end of the game, as your species zooms around the cosmos, the choices you made during the five phases of the game combine to determine your resulting "personality."

But first we were just trying to survive. We were stunned at how hard it was to make a living in the soup. You swish around using the mouse, and you have only two goals in mind. First, you need to eat -- collecting food gives you points that you can use to evolve, and collecting enough food allows you to move on to the next phase in the game. You're also on the lookout for more chunks of that magic meteorite: Breaking them open reveals little golden shields that contain genetic data for some new goody, including different ways to move, eat, attack or defend yourself. So before you can evolve spiffy fish fins, you'll need to find them in the soup.

Naturally you're also trying to avoid being someone's lunch, and the oceans are teeming with other critters. Many of them have terrifying, chompy mouths. We discovered that our simple flagella didn't give our creature enough speed to escape the more mobile predators, so after fleeing and eating everything we could, it was time to evolve some better defenses.

To change your creature's configuration, you first have to find a mate. Pressing a "call" button at the bottom of the screen will call out for love, causing little audio waves to broadcast out from your mouth. You see waves ripple through the water revealing the direction of the nearest available mate. You need to swim to your microbial lover to get it on, which we found to be very difficult with predators closing in from all sides. But once you and a mate hook up, you're taken to the creature editing screen.

One of the big takeaways we got from our time with the game was how many interesting decisions there were to make, even during the first phase of the game. You only have so many genetic points to play with, based on how much food you've stored up. And you also have a limited set of parts to build from, based on which golden shields you managed to pick up on the playfield, so your options will be slightly different each time you play.

Every piece you add or take away from your creature changes the way you play. In the first phase of the game, adding fins gives you a sharper turning radius. Spikes allow you to harm other creatures or pop bubbles that might otherwise get in your way. During our test game we discovered a pretty high-level upgrade early on, electricity, so we decided to go for it. Any creature that tried to eat us got a shock. (Some stronger predators, we discovered, took the pain and ate us anyways.)

Happy with our new creature, we hatched from an egg and began the cycle anew. It doesn't matter how many times you evolve -- your ultimate goal in the first phase of the game is just to eat enough food, as depicted on a progress bar at the bottom of the screen. You gradually grow bigger as you eat food, and periodically the camera pans back as you pass a new threshold and find yourself able to eat bigger food. Creatures that were once a threat are now too small to hurt you... but now even bigger creatures decide you're big enough to be a tasty treat. There's a great ebb and flow to the early game.

We stuck out the challenge of being a pure herbivore, and -- after a few evolutions -- we'd proudly created a zippy little plant-eater that could flee any predator. Fins gave us superior handling and a water jet on our butt allowed us to zoom through the seas faster than any predator. We were literally scooping food out of other creatures' mouths. It was pretty clear that there were other strategies, but this was the one that worked for us. Before we knew it, we'd filled up the bar at the bottom of the screen, and had the option of evolving into an amphibian and leaving the seas behind.

Clicking the button brought up a whole new creature editor, this one a fully-realized 3D editor much like the one released as the Creature Creator. All of our creature's current parts were there, but now we could add legs. We gleefully did so.

So long, soup! We were ready for the big time.

I Got Legs, I Don't Know How to Use Them

"You Rule the Pool!" Spore announced, depicting a cut-scene where our creatures tentatively strolled out of the water and peered around their new world. Spore builds the gameplay for each level off of the one before it, so even though the world was now 3D, we still used the mouse to move around, and we still had the same options as before -- i.e. hitting "call" would call out for a mate.

We discovered that Spore also has an achievement system. We gained the "Pacifist" medal for getting through the early phase of the game without killing another creature. While only a handful of awards are available for the first phase of the game, it was clear that even more would be available later on, as your gameplay options continued to expand.

As the creature phase started, the game started to give us specific goals to achieve. "Eat a fruit," the game instructed us. We explored the area around our nest (noting that a baby version of our creature was following us around) and found a strange cactus-like plant burdened with ripe, red fruit. We clicked away and devoured a snack. Mission accomplished.

Other goals that soon appeared included "find a new part" (you're still on the prowl for new genetic material) and "make a friend" (which encouraged us to interact with other creatures.) Every creature in the game has different ways you can earn its trust. Those with ears might enjoy it if you sing to them. Others might enjoy dancing. These options became available as we discovered the many strange creatures ambling around the map with us. Making friends with other species provides different benefits, like help defending your nest or the chance to use their nests to heal yourself.

After gathering some more food and genetic material, we evolved again, this time selling off some of the vestigial parts from our aquatic lives (don't need fins anymore...) and experimenting with faster legs and different mouths. It was clear that we had a lot of different strategies at our disposal: Did we want to outrun our enemies? Sing for our friends? Fight for our turf? We literally had a world of possibilities, and our choices would change based on what kind of planet we were on and what sort of random creature parts we'd found in the environment. There's no shortage of gameplay here.

A Jointly-Created Universe

As anyone who's browsed the Sporepedia can tell you, people have created a huge variety of creatures, fitting any number of themes from realistic to surrealistic to downright masochistic. Giving players a way to manage all this content is important, because it'll impact your game experience. How will you know what kind of creatures will appear on your planet?

The Sporepedia itself provides one layer of screening. Players are already giving creatures thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings. The hope is that this will be one level of filtering, screening out the really dismal creations or rewarding the truly extraordinary.

Members of the Spore community will be able to group content together into "Sporecasts," collections of similar content based around a particular theme. Players also have direct control over what appears in the game. When we started our hands-on session, before our first creature splashed down on the planet, we were asked to choose a "theme." Details are still a little fuzzy, but in theory the Spore community will be building content collections that'll allow players to customize what sorts of creatures they'll discover on their home worlds and beyond.

And what worlds there are! The possibilities seem limitless. Players right now can experiment with the Creature Creator, but all the editors in the game work the same way. We checked out the vehicle editor and building editor, all equally flexible. And we were intrigued by a new "wardrobe and accessories" editor, allowing you to dress up your creatures with crazy clothes. (People on the 'net have already experimented with faking clothes in the creature editor, with spectacular results -- we can't wait to see what people come up with using the real toolsets.) And while the world we explored was fairly terrestrial, other worlds can be surprisingly alien. Will Wright demonstrated a planet he was playing around with, a snowy, fluffy world of white vegetation.

All told, we were impressed by the level of gameplay available. It definitely looks like Spore will be more than just a gimmick-game. Decisions abound at every level of play. Will the whole game hold together as well as the introductory levels? We'll find out September 7th when Spore is unleashed on the world.