Master Your Own Galaxy

Ever wanted to play God with your own little universe?

Apparently, so did Will Wright, the celebrated father of Sim City, Sim Ant, The Sims and a slew of other similarly-themed games that have come out of Maxis over the last two decades. After years of hype and delays, the now-Electronic Arts-owned studio released Spore, a start-to-finish civilization simulator, earlier this month.

Spore lets you design your own single-cell life form, plop it into the primordial ooze, and then guide it on its evolutionary path towards sentience and eventually global — and galactic — domination. The game takes the conceptual feel of progress from all of its earlier works and moves it to a much grander scale than ever before.

The game is divided into five phases. You start in the cell stage, swimming around with flagella and other assorted parts to eat plants or smaller creatures (depending on which path you choose) in an attempt to survive and evolve to bigger and better things. Our need for immediate satisfaction is fulfilled by watching the creature grow in direct proportion to the number of little green blobs ingested. My creature, the Kennidis, was a peaceful herbivore that traded its basic flagella in for faster jets and defensive spikes.

Eventually, your fledgling species sprouts legs and crawls out onto dry land, beginning the creature stage. In your travels across the continent you will encounter other species that made it out of the water. If you were a carnivore in the earlier stages, many of these will become your dinner; however, you can also make friends through an interesting gesturing system; the better able your creature is at mimicking, the more friends it will make. As your evolution continues, you can continue to add new parts to your creature, unlocking new gestures and abilities.

After your species achieves dominance of the food web via a suitably large brain, the game enters the tribal stage. At this point, your species “no longer speaks with one voice.” The game places you in control of one tribe, and the camera moves to a top-down view that will be familiar to real-time strategy game veterans. Your task again is to achieve dominance over your neighbors, and again you are presented with two options. If you focus your development on weapons, you can build up an army and wipe out the competition. Alternatively, you can develop musical instruments and go on a world tour to the neighboring villages; if you play suitably well, an alliance will eventually develop.

Once you become the dominant regional power, Spore zooms out even further to the planetary-scale civilization stage. Your village becomes a mighty city, and you take on the role of city planner. Instead of designing creatures, your focus moves to architecture and vehicles as your civilization expands out in search of Spice, a valuable commodity (and an homage to Frank Herbert’s Dune, for you sci-fi fans out there). There are three paths to take toward eventual control of the world: religious, in which you send megaphone-equipped vehicles out to convert the unwashed masses; economic, where you develop trade routes and eventually buy out other cities; and military, which allows you to develop advanced weaponry culminating in ICBMs that will level other civilizations to rubble with the click of a button.

Whichever path you choose, after you take control of your world, your species will eventually make the jump into outer space and into the final stage of the game. Here, you go on your own little Star Trek, zooming about from world to world, making first contact with other space-faring races, abducting species for terraforming and research, and generally trying to make your way towards the center of the galaxy to uncover its secrets. This is the most expansive and far-reaching segment of the game, and it is one that I have yet to “complete.” Currently, the mighty Kennidis Empire has pacified the immediate space around Planet Mello, but unfortunately now faces an intergalactic war with the nefarious Grox. How things will develop remains to be seen.

My overall impression of Spore is definitely positive, and I wish the rigors of senior year would afford me more playtime with my fledgling galactic explorers. However, the game definitely has some rough edges. The primary complaint is that the first four stages of the game feel like half-baked attachments that only delay the real game in the space stage. This is truly unfortunate because there is a lot of potential for fun in these early parts of the game, as evidenced by Spore Origins, the iPhone spin-off of the cell stage. I hope EA will go back and add to these early parts with software patches in the future, but for now I will just focus on taking the entire galaxy. I wonder if there is a part that will do my problem sets for me in there somewhere. Hmmm...