If you enjoy designing things starting from a bacteria going all the way to a spaceship, you'll enjoy Spore, and if you like universe exploration Spore's got that too. Beginning of the game is, in recent terms, Agario-like. You eat other cells to evolve, eventually become a fish-like thingy and develop leg-like thingies finally become a creature of the land. You lay eggs, defend your nest, and destroy other nests, only to evolve into a social creature: let's call him "cave dude". The cave dudes you design, in time, triumph over other tribes and environments, become civilized dudes (as far as I remember that's where your bio evolution stops). Then you research and start to design your vehicles weapons etc. Finally once you dominate, indoctrinate or unite your planet you design your spaceship and sail off into the unknown to meet alien races and keep researching for better weapons, colonizing other planets etc etc. You discover other alien species, trade with, indoctrinate or dominate them. The end "end game" is discovering the center of the universe but the game is open ended. Most if not all your design choices are aesthetical, they don't serve much purpose, as in "this leg" you choose won't be stronger or faster than "that leg" or "this part of a tank" is not different than others, but it's fun to be able to make a rubber-ducky tank for example or you can eat things with your butt and put the other end to an unexpected place. It certainly doesn't give you a strategic advantage or has any practical use whatsoever but who cares?! Creepy&Cute is a fine addition since it gives you a whole lot of new pieces to play with. Galactic Adventures, plays like a hero based RTS and very poorly made. It's supposed to be a bunch of missions for your "ship captain", and was a disappointment for me. A word of warning: The strategy, space combat, trading, politics etc elements are simplistic/basic, Spore is NOT fully (only partially and very casually) a sim, nor a 4X nor an RTS game.
I supported/purchased this game long ago when it was still in early early development and own it on a different platform. I've enjoyed my time with it and still return to play it every once in a while. I love the music, I love the graphics and it never crashed for me (on Windows 7&8). It delivers what it promises and the price makes it a catch but (in my personal opinion) it has two major flaws. One is that there is no explanation such as a text that explains which crafting bench does what and a development tree or advancement hierarchy of sorts which would normally tell you that you have to, for example, craft a certain item made by a certain crafting station so that you can make a more advanced crafting station to make fine ingredients and/or produce. You can figure out that the crude workbench is the first thing you have to set up but after that all types and sorts of craftables are presented in a pool which is not organized. It's like a soup and you have to dig through it by trial and error to figure out what order you have to do things, and there is actually a specific order. This makes starting the game and learning it quite frustrating. The second major flaw is the behaviour of gnomes. I think there is still something wrong with it. Sometimes they just stay idle when they're not sleeping and do nothing even when there are no mining jobs while there are jobs such as crafting, hauling, foraging, tree chopping lined up waiting for them (mining is always prioritized that's why I mentioned it), and I'm aware of priority setting and job assignments, doesn't help. This sometimes causes chokes in production. From early development to release I never managed to get a big kingdom of gnomes like the ones shown on plenty of screenshots so the behaviour thing might be my shortcoming. The lack of or non-existence of any guidence, even a basic tech-tree, however is definitely problematic. You have to be a solid wiki reader to overcome that steep learning curve in this game.
I'll never trust the reviews to decide if I should buy a game or not. It's your typical "pirateering" game with ship navigation, simple ship battles and port to port trading, without any significant differences other than a very simple very bland trading system, static isometric combat camera angle and supposed auto aim which may at times miss horribly even when enemy ship is right up your you know what. Controls are absolutely horrible, at least for keyboard and mouse. Courting the daughters mini game is a gimmick, fencing is either too hard or too easy there is no progression. I don't have much to say other than I totally regret buying this. There are freeware games that does "pirate game" better than this.
Other than wolves and bears you poke or get poked by you won't be dealing with any otherworldly beings or such. You still have to paranoidly look around in the large and lonely maps (which connect to eachother) and listen to your surroundings because you never know when a forest animal will jump you (animals just bail on easy mode). Hey maybe some day there'll be a mod to add zambies or something. It has a very very simple UI, yet pretty functional. Even in the easiest setting it's not an easy game. You can't build a stable base and expect to survive off of your little farm, you have to constantly move, scavenge, and Gog willing, craft a bow and a couple of arrows (don't get your hopes up). I've been playing it for a while now, I own it on a different platform, and even a few months back it was worth your money. So much was added to it and more is on the way. So far game runs very smooth, I experienced no problems save two crashes in many months of play time. Oh and you are a "white man" in this game, meaning: you can't jump. Not that you can't jump high, you just can't jump at all, there's no jumping in this game. So you have to walk around obstacles and you can't jump over small gaps. There's crouching for stealth purposes but no jumping. I'm not sure if that's good or bad but the overall experience is pretty awesome. Sometimes I get the feeling that something is missing but can't put my finger on it. All in all it's a full game and I have no idea what can be added to it.
This is one of my all time favorites so I just can not be objective about this one! Excellent writing, excellent story telling, so many funny and brilliantly designed characters, no annoying little bits (such as quick time events doom choices or such), nice puzzles along the way... It's a good story, told in a wacky and funny way, dressed with many puns to give you plenty of chuckles. You'll just love Flux Wildly and Drew Blanc. Although if you expect a challenging point and click adventure to make you pull your hair out, this isn't your cup of tea: veterans of the genre might find it too easy. Point and click adventure is my genre of choice but I wouldn't say I'm a pro or something like that, and I've visited walkthroughs in many games. For a measurement let me say I only visited a walkthrough once or twice while playing this. But still even the veterans would find good value in the characters, the story and the jokes. UI is easy to use, I doubt the controls would give you any trouble at all. I would strongly recommend this game.
Rogue-like, sci-fi, turn based, RPG with some survival game elements in it. Yep, that sums it up. Aside the obvious, music pretty awesome. Good enemy variety and weapon variety but variety is also what the spells or "psi abilities" lack. I'd say don't bother with crafting at all other than very basic very simple food items and ammo, simply because it is not implemented properly. There are an insane amount of "ingredient" items which drop randomly, and you have to get these specific common and rare ingredients for specific recipes, and they don't work for anything else. The recipe book (the database thingy in the game) does not classify recipes. Oddly enough even the wiki made for this game is messy as hell. Forget about upgrading through crafting or making yourself weapons and armor. Even on easy difficulty I found my inventory packed full of ingredients plenty of them were rare and none of them were useful. You are supposed to "try" recipes: meaning that you shove the ingredients in a lab or cooking machine (which have limited number of uses) and discover recipes or end up getting you items destroyed. Info texts of items are supposed to give you some "hints" along with the messages you find/salvage and decode. So this is how the crafting system is "supposed to" work but well, it doesn't work at all. If you're lucky, you win; if you're really lucky, you just find an awesome flamethrower or auto-shotgun and pewpew everything. Even though unfortunate (because who wouldn't want to make an alien bazooka or mega-ultra-BFG-lazer gun?) as long as you ignore the crafting system you'll get more out of the game.
This is one of those games which you say "I'll give it a go, play for 20 minutes maybe half an hour, then get back to my chores" then wake up to find yourself after 3 hours with still chores to do. If you have to cook, clean or such do not start playing this game. I don't know what exactly keeps me going; probably one or all of these: the amazing space ambiance, cool music, easy to understand, easy to use controls, (almost casual dare I say), a wide and intimidating galaxy map waiting to be explored. Though there is not much mission variety, commodity trading, pirating, smuggling while managing reputation with oodles and oodles of factions (oodles and oodles means "a lot"). It might get too repetitive too soon though and if you don't enjoy space travel for the sake of space travel you won't get much replay value out of this. Trade system and trading is not central to the game and not very detailed but that's a plus for me. It's a simple trade system, you follow the news where ever you dock, and just buy low, sell high. Smuggling with small ships is always good. It appears to have decent number of gun variety, power-ups several gizmos, gadgets etc. Factions each have their unique sets of ships of course but there is no balance between factions. So if you want the most powerful ship possible you'll eventually have to get a specific ship from a specific faction, which effects your play choices (so you don't have 100% freedom in the galaxy). Also you may get sucked in by a wormhole and pop out in the middle of a hostile zone surrounded by huge ships or get ambushed by a huge fleet which warps in on your exact location, while you're allowed to get only two mercs (which you can not control or give orders to) with you but still, escape is always an option. There are some unfair moments where you have a 99% win chance but you end up becoming space junk; yep that may happen as well.
