I mostly agree with your review.
My take is that Spore still feels like the idea for a game, rather than the finished article.
The animation is superb, the world feels solid and is pretty to look at. The graphics are at their best in the Space stage and it
is breathtaking to be able to zoom in from a view of the galaxy right down, passed clusters of stars and then individual suns and finally onto the surface of the planets themselves where there are cities and the creatures that inhabit them.
But it doesn't take long to realise that all of this graphical sophistication overlays a stupidly simple level of gameplay.
I get a sense of EA cutting its losses and getting the thing to market rather than spend any more time developing the game concepts or mechanics. It's a shame.
As I say, it still feels like the idea of a game - the odd thing is how obviously it fails where it does. For example:
At the Creature Stage - the elements you build your creature out of don't
stack. So that, once you've achieved a level of any particular skill (e.g. Charm or Spit) adding extra elements that relate to that skill don't enhance it. So, I
can't build a mad creature that is covered in charm boosting properties at the expense of everything else and obtain a
massive score in the Charm skill.
Everything tends towards the median - you can't get far specialising in one skill, you appear to be forced towards an at least average score in all skills. So, having a massive score in Charm would be pointless anyway.
You are forced towards a social strategy. So, I couldn't get far with a purely aggressive carnivore without making some kind of attempt to ally with other creatures in order to win in fights against other tribes. That means compromising investing in fighting skills for those with a social element.
Likewise, I can't be a fantastically charming creature that uses that skill to ally with more aggressive ones and use them as bodyguards to compensate for its lack of fighting abilities.
Regarding allies - there doesn't appear to be any
real mechanism to handle the relative status of the various tribes - so, for instance, I've seen two tribes display aggressive behaviour towards one another but I have been able to ally with both of them independently and when recruited to my pack they don't appear to want to fight one another. Shouldn't the enemy of my friend be my enemy, and vice versa?
At the Civilisation stage - the buildings have no variation in effectiveness except in how they are positioned next to one another. So, adding mechanical bits to a factory doesn't make it more productive but increase its negative effect on the mood of the population. Likewise, you can't make a house that creates a happier mood at the expense of, say, how many people it can hold.
At the Space stage - the trading elements appear to be random so that you can't forecast and therefore benefit from demand and production variations in different parts of the galaxy.
All stages of the game progress regardless of your performance - in other words, you
will succeed in finishing each stage no matter how little effort you put into playing it.
You can't die. So, it's not about evolution this game, is it, really - because failing to survive is what drives that process onwards?
My feeling is that there is another version of the game to be released some time in the future using the same graphical concepts which could address all of these failings.
It may be, given the complexity of what we're talking about here - i.e. a complete artificial ecosystem - that what we're seeing in the failings of the current version of Spore are really the limitations of the technology in general. If you really wanted to do what Spore pretends to achieve - make your own Universe in box - you'd need a massive amount of processing power to handle the vast arrays of data that each situation could generate even from a vastly simplified model. Maybe the problems with the game are just the kinds of compromises you have to make if you want the current crop of processors to be able to handle all the graphical flourishes which make the game so accessible.
The interesting thing, I think, is that Spore goes to prove, for me, that what
really makes a game worthwhile is not so often what appears on the screen, how many polygons and fps and full screen bloom effects - which are very often
technological milestones - but what goes on inside the
heart of it - where people have thought about what motivates us as actual human beings - emotional things like fear and pride and love and hate, loyalty and selfishness - when games designers get those elements of a game right then they really create things that are special and engaging.
