I like Spore, I really do, but it was a disappointment for me. They made some design decisions that while I understand why they were done (to appeal to a more casual audience), have taken some of the enjoyment out of the game for me. To get a brief overview of how I feel about each stage
I liked the cell stage. It was generally what I wanted and expected.
The creature stage felt like a collection of mini games. I wanted it to be a tale of survival, I wanted to be thrown into the wild and hunt or be hunted. Instead what I got was a stage where I was essentially forced to dance and sing my way through in order for the AI to not be sycophantically hostile in the space stage (more on that in a second). It also felt like I was grinding my way through the creature stage. I wanted my creature to look a certain way and in order to achieve this look, I had to do the same tasks over and over until I found the parts I wanted. Not fun.
The tribal stage was okay. I didn't exactly like it, but I didn't hate it. The main thing preventing me from liking this stage is the lack of depth and strategy required to succeed. Easy mode, normal mode, or hard mode, it doesn't matter, I know I'm going to win, the game knows I'm going to win, but I'm still required to go through the motions.
Then we have the civilization stage. My feelings for this stage are about the same as they are for the tribal stage, although I did enjoy this stage slightly more.
Then, we have the space stage. Is it possible to love something but hate it at the same time? I love the sense of scale. If you ever thought we humans on Earth were important, spore helps you to realize that this isn't the case. It's pretty cool that a game is able to get people to realize this.
In any case, space is by far my favorite stage, I feel like the space stage is the actual game and the previous four stages were mere tutorials for space. There are a number of problems with this stage, though, and subsequently, while it's by far my favorite stage, it's also the most disappointing.
The biggest problem with Space is the AI. Let's examine exactly what happens here:
- Player goes out into space
- Player meets empire
- Empire demands money
- Player, having just started the game, has no money. Player rejects demands
- Empire declares war on player
- Empire invades a colony.
- Player rushes to defend colony. Ensue boring minigame in which player dies a great many times having to defend said colony because players ship isn't upgraded at all
- Player manages to kill off the invaders! Yay!
- Five minutes later, empire invades colony
- Player rushes to defend colony. Ensue boring minigame in which player dies a great many times having to defend said colony because players ship isn't upgraded at all
- Player manages to kill off the invaders! Yay!
- Five minutes later, empire invades colony . . .
You see where I'm going with this. It's impossible to dig yourself out of that situation because five minutes is not enough time to get anything done. If you ignore the alien attacks, the aliens will either capture or destory your colonies.
Remember before how I said that if your too hostile early on, you encounter hostility in space? I had to go back and replay the first four stages, essentially dancing and singing my way through (tons of fun
). I even chose easy mode this next time around compared to the normal mode I started with. Well, the same things still happened, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. In the end, I did manage to break my way out of that ruthless cycle, I now have defense satellites that do an okay job at fending off attacks, but I'm still not enjoying the space stage as much as I could be.
The problem now is that you once again have to rush to the defense of colonies, but this time it isn't against alien attacks - it's against virus' that have the potential to destroy the ecosystem on your worlds. This is another boring minigame that you're forced to do. They aren't as frequent as the alien invasions, but they are extremely annoying. I expected the space game to be a sandbox game, not babysit your colonies by doing repetitive boring minigames over and over.
Finally, another major problem I see in the space stage - You have no incentive to owning a lot of colonies. You have to zoom in to each individual colony to collect spice, then zoom in to other colonies to sell that spice. This makes it so that you only need a handful of worlds to obtain the maximum amount of spice production. An easy fix would have been to make it so each colony gives you a small amount of spice automatically without having to zoom in and talk to the colony. The maximum amount of spice that you can hold could have then been removed and bam, you now have an incentive to having a lot of colonies. In my game right now, I would expand, but I honestly see no reason to.
Oh, and we need long range communicators. Having to scroll all the way in just to talk to a colony is silly. And while I'm complaining about space, the reward for getting to the center of the galaxy is lame.
So I guess to answer the question, yes, Spore was a disappointment to me in that there are a lot of things I dislike. There are a lot of things that could have been improved. I still like the game, though, despite all that stuff.