Theirry Nguyen has written what appears to be the very first full review of Spore over at 1up. You can read the full review at: , or read some of the highlights here:
Leave it to iconic game designer and Maxis cofounder Will Wright to one-up his own work on . While his dollhouse/life-drama simulator became phenomenally successful, he didn’t just sit back and collect simoleans. After making a game about human lives, he started working on (and has finally released) , which Wright himself nicknamed “SimEverything,” since its focus extends beyond humanity and tackles life on a…well, galactic scale. If you really need a quick one-line summary of what Spore is, I guess I’d describe it as “intelligent design via minigames.” The Spore “plot” (it’s got one, honest) is about your species’ multistage journey from panspermia all the way to the center of the galaxy. You start your run of minigames with the Cell stage (where you’re just a single-celled organism munching at whatever you can get) and work your way through the Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space stages.
This era-spanning scope allows for Spore to feel like a different game at any particular moment, depending on what stage you’re in. To use the language of other games, the Cell stage resembles (but with more purpose); the Creature stage feels like a mashup of , The Sims, and, er, Simon Says; the Tribal stage plays like an elementary real-time strategy game; the Civilization stage is sort of like a real-time version of, well, ; and finally, the Space stage makes me feel like I’m in a hybrid of and .
Sounds like Spore is quite a mashup of gameplay and strategies, in fact it’s such a mashup, that the final grade was a B+ for Spore.
As I mentioned earlier, strictly as a game, Spore’s a flawed effort in five different genres, smushed together in a casual-player-friendly manner. But as a tangible representation of intelligent design, with an emphasis on creation and sharing, it falls perfectly in line with the rest of Will Wright’s work. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s definitely one that any serious gamer should try.
