SPORE™ Collection

musthave classic strategy game

cool game and having fun love it

greaane alot to do good for time of release

I enjoy this game but have been unable to play it for awhile now due to a persistent visual glitch that I was hoping the recent update might have fixed. Unfortunately the glitch is still there.

I was so eager for this game when it was first announced, I hung onto every video and article posted about it for 2 years. But the more I played it, the more it turned into the biggest gaming let down of my life. They called it "sim everything" you start out as a single cell organism, collect parts and DNA to evolve your creature, make it sentient and ultimately space-faring. You see I once visited a museum with an interactive exhibit, using a computer you designed a creature and then set it loose in a simulated world where it would thrive or perish based on how well you had designed the creature and what other creatures were running about. I assumed Spore would be the same, especially when they said everything was procedurally generated, like how your creatures moved and interacted with the world. And how you designed the skeletal structure which influenced their movements. Also how your game would be constantly updated and populated with other player's creations. But the gameplay that was delivered was very different. For one thing many of the advertised featured were cut from the final product, I read somewhere that the software was too complex to put on the disk, so they simplified it. Making this the only product I know of where it's prototype was more advanced. You see each body part has a number attached to it and it does that job at that fixed rate no matter where you put it on the creature or how else it's shaped. You give a creature 10 eyes, it sees only as well as a creature with 1. A creature with tiny legs moves just as fast as one with very long legs. Put the head at one end but the mouth on the other and it makes no difference. There's supposed to be this Darwinian contest for survival but it really doesn't matter what creatures survive or go extinct, once you move onto the tribal stage, your planet's list of creatures gets reset. And in the tribal stage you can heard animals for food but since players keep putting arms on their creatures to help them survive so it's these creatures that keep showing up. It's weird to farm animals with hands, it looks like you're farming simians. When you get to the space stage and explore and colonise other planets, see alien cities, this is where it gets really disappointing. The planets all start to look familiar as there's maybe 6 of them just in different colours. There's a very small number of different plants so 2 different worlds may have the exact same kinds of trees. For some reason the animals that populate these worlds all seem to be from the game's very early animal stage so their unimpressive. Sometimes an alien world will have an earlier version of the very creature you're playing as! Also one alien civilization may have the exact same buildings as a completely different one. Unlike every other stage, the space stage (which everything seems to build to) is the only one without any goal. Making everything else feel like a mini game in a space empire building game. And a very simple space empire game it is too. One of the first things to happen at this stage is to be introduced to the Grox, an extremely hostile alien species which keeps attacking planets for some mysterious reason. But this reason is never revealed, not even when you find the Grox or destroy them. The game was made worse with it's only expansion pack. It allowed players to create missions for the captains of your ships to go on. The tools to create these missions were simple to use while opening up enormous possibilities. Unfortunately the tools used to create props are the same ones used to create buildings and vehicles and these get mixed in with the game. So you might visit an alien world who's capital building looks like a "wet floor" sign. What's more there's no quality control with these. I once accepted a mission that looked terrible and all the text was written in a foreign language. But what really broke my heart was when all the player-created content stopped flowing in. I tried EVERYTHING to fix it, even bought a 2nd copy if the game. Nothing worked. While this game does have some challenge, humour and plenty of creative possibilities, it's by no means the complex life-simulator I was led to believe it was. And even putting that aside, the game has multiple problems with it's core gameplay mechanics and features. My advice, if you want to play a game like this, maybe get Stellaris instead. It's basically Spore's space level with much less creativity but much more depth, challenge and much fewer bugs.