Editors Note: In the process of reevaluating our review standards, the Ripten editorial team has agreed upon a no syndication policy for any review (past, present, or future) indexed in the Ripten catalog. In light of this, we have replaced the previous syndicated review with the exclusive Ripten review below. Thank you.

From the mind of Will Wright comes the hype juggernaut Spore. We’ve been watching and waiting for this game for long enough to watch actual evolution take place, but was it worth the wait?

First off, I’m not taking any of the crazy DRM issues into account here, as this is a game review and not a review on EA’s licensing practices, so be sure to read the many other articles on the issue on this site here, here, here, and here. I’m going to focus on the game itself. With that little disclaimer aside, let’s discuss the game itself.

Spore tasks players with evolving a single-celled organism of pure cuteness on up through several stages until they become a galactic superpower of cuteness. From the mind of Will Wright, you can see the cartooniness that made him ass-tons of money from Sims expansion packs — it’s prevalent in this game while the seriousness of the game that made him famous (SimCity) has gone the way of the dodo.

There are five stages of the game, each a separate evolutionary stage that plays slightly different than the last. The cell stage is by far the shortest and plays quite similar to a little game called flOw. It could very easily be a flash game for free on some website somewhere. The main goal here is to eat and survive.

It’s here that what you eat for the rest of the game is determined, and it’s the only time in the game where you’ll be able to change from a herbivore mouth to a carnivore mouth, thus changing what you can eat. You can even put both on your cell and eat EVERYTHING. What you eat is tracked on a history graph, and at the end of the cell stage, wherever you are on the graph determines what your creature will eat for the rest of the game. Once you’ve eaten all you can, it’s time to grow some legs and crawl up to dry land.

Once on land, the game transforms into a watered-down third-person adventure game where you can either attack other creatures or make friends with them. Your main task is to get DNA and parts to evolve into a more efficient killing or dancing machine. You’ll also now have to contend with hunger, and your diet choices from the cell stage come into play here, determining what you’ll be able to eat.

Herbivores will eat fruit from trees while carnivores will be forced to either scavenge for dead bodies or make some creatures dead to eat some meat. Omnivores, of course, can eat whatever they want. The nice part is that this has no bearing on your attitude towards other creatures at all. You want to be a meat eater and still make friends? No problem there. I mean, you’ll obviously not be able to make friends with everyone, as you’ll starve to death, but there is nothing stopping you from being a very social meat eater.

It all comes down to the parts that you put on your creature. Certain parts give certain stats that directly determine what your creature will be good at. There are trade-offs, of course, so you can’t be great at everything, but mix and match enough, and you can probably tackle whatever comes your way.

One evolutionary step after another and you’ll gain the ability to bring along friends in your flock. This is a great way for socially focused creatures to survive — make friends with brutal slayers of animal kind to protect your goofy dancing ass and you’re set.

Once you’ve accumulated enough DNA, you’ll evolve to the tribal stage. The sad part of this is that it’s the end of customizing your creature. The most you can do in the tribal stage is play a little dress-up. It’s neat and all, but depending on what your creature looks like at this point, the dressing up may be a pain. It’s sort of hard to put a head on something that is covered with horns and eyeballs.

The game itself transforms into a very generic real-time strategy game, where food becomes the most important thing in the world to your race. Other tribes will pop up and you’ll have the choice to either make war with them or play sweet music for them till they fall in love with you and start sending you food. Once you either befriend or destroy the other tribes, it’s time to form a civilization.

Now that you’re civilized, you once again can custom build some stuff, namely your planes, tanks, and boats. The creation tools are again the highlight of the stage, though economic and religious vehicles tend to be a little too… goofy for my tastes. It’s hard to take a tank seriously when the weapon of choice is a giant pipe organ and some horns.

The actual gameplay here isn’t that different than the tribal stage — instead of ordering your creatures around, you’ll be building vehicles and sending the vehicles around… though you’ll still be doing basically the same as before. You won’t be able to win by allying with the other cities, though. You pretty much have to take them over, but how you go about it can be a little different.

You’ll start off either religious, economic, or militaristic. Again, this is determined by your actions in the previous stage. You can’t actually change your style, but if you take over a city with another focus, you can choose to keep the focus of that city. This can be a bit of a burden if you’re looking to change your overall focus from what you started with to something else.

Religious and military takeovers are basically the same, though religious takeovers don’t seem to actually cause a war. Either way, you still drive up to a city and try to take it over. Economic takeovers, however, require you to be friends with the other city, and then set up a trade route. Trade routes make you extra money, and once they get to a certain point, you can buy out the other nation’s city.

Once you get all the other cities flying the flag of your nation, your race builds a spaceship and you can take to the stars.

The space stage is sort of a strategy game, though it’s a pain in the ass to manage your empire as you are just a ship flying around doing stuff (more on that in a bit). The goal of the space stage is to expand your empire, with a little caveat that you should focus on getting to the center of the galaxy. This is the one overarching mission, and it can be completely ignored if you so choose. The space stage is really where the “simy” sandbox style play that made Will Wright famous finally comes through.

The problem with the space stage is that you go from a relatively simple game with a moderately… moderate difficulty to a freakish beast of complexity. Not that it’s overly complicated really, but for only having one ship to control, it’s insanely complex. Imagine trying to control a game of Civilization, only instead of the omniscient control, it’s feels like a third person shooter.

To tell your city to build a wall, you’ll have to run Link or Marcus or Snake or WHOMEVER over to the city and then say, “Hey, build a wall.” Meanwhile, some town four hundred miles away calls and says, “Yo! We’re being attacked over here!” Being that you are the sole military unit in this freaky game of civilization, you have to run the whole way back to that city to protect it. It has potential, but the size of the galaxy in Spore works against it here.

That’s not to say it’s all bad. You do get tools eventually that allow you to place better turrets and such things to reduce your need to go to these planets for every emergency, but you’ll still end up going there, as the only way to make money in the space game is to sell spice. The only way to get spice is to fly to one of your planets that is gathering the spice and pick it up, and then fly around finding people willing to pay top dollar to buy it. There is no automated way to just bring in money in the game.

It wouldn’t be too bad, I suppose, but the buyers of the spice have random prices for the stuff, so it’s not like you can just, say, pick up all your pink spice and take it to planet X to make a shit-ton of money. Just because planet X paid a hundred-thousand space bucks ten minutes ago doesn’t mean anything now.

It makes the whole thing a giant time sink that just feels like busy work. People who’ve played any number of MMO’s will feel at home with the system, as it feels like they’re just trying to keep you busy doing mundane work so you’ll keep giving them your money.

It’s sad that the space game has the most problems and it seems to be where the focus of the game is. You could very easily start up a cell and run to the space stage in less than an hour if you really wanted to, while the space stage potentially has no end. With a purported half a million stars and who knows how many planets, taking over the entire galaxy would be quite time consuming to say the least.

Overall, the game is fun, if a little bit of a pain. Each stage is basically a very generic version of other genres of games and this keeps things pretty fresh, but they are VERY generic. If you’re a hardcore gamer then it might be kind of a let down, but for the casual crowd it’ll probably be a learning experience.

My wife is a causal gamer, and it was amazing seeing her struggle with some of the stuff in the game. Like a lot of The Sims players, she’s never had even a slight interest in RTS games, so things that came second nature to me, or seemed overly simplified, were confusing and difficult for her.

The thing that both my wife and I gathered from the whole experience, though, was that the game is incredibly fun, even though most of the fun simply derives from the fact that you made these things. There is something that is just awesome about flying to some other planet and seeing something new or something that you’ve made yourself in another game.

The pollination system, or whatever they call it, keeps the game fresh and interesting no matter what, and I have yet to see any giant penises… though I did find an entire planet of walking Sylvester Stallone heads. There is also something frightening about the idea that someone right now could be playing the game and coming across some of my crappy creations.

All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty good game. Making creatures and vehicles is by far the most fun, but the fun carries over to the rest of the game simply when you use those creatures you’ve created to do other things. The learning curve is a little steep at times, and that’s further complicated by the fact that each stage plays like a completely different game than the last, making it more of a learning wave. The space stage is definitely flawed, but is still a lot of fun.

I’d say the biggest problem with the game is that it falls in some kind of neutral zone of gaming. Fans of The Sims (who this games seems to be marketed for) will find it a bit difficult, and the AI can be absolutely brutal at times, whereas fans of SimCity will find the game simply too simple. The potential is there, but it falls a bit short. Even so, the entire idea of the sharing of creatures, buildings, and vehicles keeps the space game fresh and new for a lot longer than you would think.

Tags: Cell, DRM, evolution, galactic superpower of cuteness, Sim Everything, space, spore, Will-Wright

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