SPORE: Creature
Eventually, after swimming around as a single-celled organism for a while, you are prompted to grow some legs and climb up out of the water – thus begins the Creature stage of SPORE.
During the Creature stage you’ve got a few more goals to meet than simply eating… You have to deal with the neighbors, for example. Some of them might be friendly, some might not, but none of them are going to simply leave you alone. You need to either socialize with them or kill them, your choice.
You have to find food – either by gathering up fruits or by killing other creatures.
You have to find evolutionary bits. Yes, that’s right, you need to go hunting for bits. When you first crawl ashore you’ve got access to maybe a dozen parts in the Creature Editor. All the other parts are located in skeltons lying on the ground, or on other creatures that you need to befriend/kill.
So, once again, you’re arbitrarily limited in what you can do. If you want to build a tentacled horror you have to find the tentacles first. If you want to build some kind of bird/monkey hybrid, you need to find a beak and tail and hands and whatever else first. None of it is simply available. Which means that you cannot, generally speaking, build whatever you want.
Worse, you seem to be stuck with just one food type. Whatever mouth you ate as a cell is what you eat now as a creature. Changed your mind? Don’t want to be an herbivore anymore? Too bad.
The controls are again fairly simple – click to act. Click on the ground to move there, click on a creature to talk/kill, click on fruit to eat it, click on skeletons to gather bits.
Interacting with other creatures is also fairly simple. If you equip social parts on your creature you get the ability to dance and sing and pose. When you attempt to socialize with another creature they’ll perform an action, and you have to mimic it. Do a good enough job of copying them and they’ll be impressed.
If you equip combat parts on your creature you get various attacks that you can perform on other creatures – biting, striking, spitting and the like. Do a good enough job of clubbing the other creature and they’ll be dead.
As you overcome the other creatures on the continent you slowly become smarter. You gain the ability to form a pack, operating as a larger group. Get smart enough and you learn how to use tools and evolve into the Tribal stage.
A fairly large annoyance is the “epic” creatures you run in to… These are absolutely giant monsters that basically act as natural hazards. They’re just plain too big to be socialized or killed, you just have to get out of the way. I’m annoyed that the player is unable to get that big. It seems to me that if I want to evolve in that direction I ought to be able to.
Once again the gameplay is pretty fun, if a bit simple, but I was really annoyed at the limitations. SPORE was hyped as a game where you could literally be anything. You could create any kind of creature, any crazy thing you could imagine. And while you are able to build a lot of things, there are also a lot of arbitrary limitations.
I’m not talking about parts that are just plain missing… There is no “tentacle” part, I understand that, and I can deal with not being able to build a tentacled monster. But the editor forces bilateral symmetry on you, so creating creatures with an odd number of parts/limbs/whatever is very difficult. And you have to locate and unlock any part before you can use it. And you are apparently stuck with just the one type of mouth.