SPORE™ Collection

I first bought and played Spore just after the release of Spore Galactic Adventures back in mid-2009, and it was a blast! You start in the water as a cell that must eat other cells to grow and evolve until you are more like a fish and big enough to grown legs and move out of the water onto solid ground. Once on the ground you go through arguable the funnest part of the game, you could either take half an hour or days continuing to unlock new evolution body parts and roaming the world in 3D RPG style, either befriending or defeating other creatures nests to grow stronger. Once your creature is done physically evolving you move onto tribal stage, where you and several other races have adapted to making huts and fires for warmth and gathering fruits or fishing for food, once again you can either befriend or destroy the other tribes to advance accordingly. Then comes the era of modern civilization, where you become adaptive and smart enough to create tanks, ships, and planes, and design an entire city of your own! One constant in Spore is it always allows you to choose your own path and make your own decisions on how to survive and advance, from whether your and herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore, to whether you are a religious or military nation. And finally comes the stage of inter-galactic travel, you get to design your own spaceship traverse thousands of star systems to meet hundreds of other advanced alien species, trade, ally, and conquer to expand you galactic empire! There are also special enemies and cool secrets to discover. The Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack makes the game even more fun! During space stage you get to control your captain and beam down on planets to play player-created missions, or make and share missions of your own, the possibilities are limitless! I also bought the Creepy & Cute expansion pack as soon as it came out and it makes the creature evolution even more fun! I would definitely recommend this title to anyone!

- No UI scaling. Looks really crunchy at default resolution but the interface is tiny at 4K. - Little to no autosaving. When the game crashes (which it does fairly often) you will be reset back to your last manual save. It doesn't save when you change between generations, not even sure if it saves when you evolve to the next stage. - Quite grindy and mindless gameplay, clumsy controls

Spore is one of those games that grabs your attention right away with its big, bold concept. Created by Maxis, the minds behind The Sims, it lets you guide a species from a tiny single-cell organism all the way to a sprawling galactic empire. On paper, it’s the kind of game you dream about, and at its best, it delivers moments of pure joy and creativity. The heart of Spore lies in its incredible customization tools. Designing your own creatures, vehicles, and even spaceships is intuitive and endlessly fun. It’s hard not to smile when you see your bizarre creation come to life, stumbling or strutting its way through the world. The early stages, like Cell and Creature, are especially engaging. There’s a real sense of evolution and progress as you adapt your creation to survive and thrive. But as ambitious as Spore is, it doesn’t always stick the landing. The middle stages—Tribal and Civilization—are where the cracks start to show. While they introduce cool new ideas, they feel shallow compared to the rest of the game. Tasks get repetitive, and the gameplay lacks the depth that could have made these stages more compelling. You can’t help but feel like they were rushed or simply not given enough attention. Even beyond that, Spore struggles with consistency. The transitions between stages feel disjointed, and the overall experience doesn’t always flow as smoothly as you’d hope. It’s also a bit buggy and unbalanced in places, which can pull you out of the experience. Still, there’s no denying that Spore is something special. It’s not perfect, but it’s creative, charming, and genuinely unlike anything else out there. If you can look past its rough edges and occasional missteps, it’s an unforgettable journey through evolution and beyond.

This game has a special place in my heart because It came out my sophmore year in highschool and it was such a new and interesting concept. It's such a unique experience that has really been replicated since. It holds up so well to current gaming standards that a 5 year old could jump on this and enjoy themselves. 10/10 would buy 10 more times! As of writing this review it is $8.99 for the Spore Collection on sale

Spore is an oddity. Despite being creatively original, mechanically unique, and immensely popular in its day, it somehow managed to escape being the inspiration for a thousand cash-grabbing copycats. This means that, nearly two decades later, Spore is still a one-of-a-kind classic that retains its novelty for any modern-day gamer just now deciding to give it a go. To start off, the scope of this game is absolutely, absurdly massive. I mean that thematically AND mechanically. Each savegame spans billions of years. Your perspective starts with a single-celled organism and gradually zooms out, so to speak, to encompass an entire galaxy. To illustrate this huge amount of time and evolution, the game actually *changes genres* no fewer than four times. And we're not splitting hairs here, either - the game literally goes from "flOw" to RPG to RTS to a hybrid space-trading god-sim. You will go from putting eyes on an ameoba to putting sails on a ship to putting genetically engineered lifeforms on any planet you wish. Just the fact that all of this is present in a single game is insane and beautiful. So why didn't its novelty and popularity spawn a host of lifeless Spore clones? Because it's not actually a very good game. Spore quickly becomes butter spread over too much bread. Each of its many states of being is a shallow gameplay experience that, because they are all only vaguely interrelated, fails to lend depth to any of the others. You will always come away from it feeling that something was missing - that perhaps you had just played a feature-stripped open beta. Then you remember that it was 2008, and this was just how it shipped. But with all of that said, there's still something wonderful about it. You need an imagination to fill in the gaps, but I enjoy that. Do try it out. You will either find it charming and come back to it every now and again (as I do), or you will be bored and never come back. Either way, it's a rarity you've got to experience at least once.