Spore - Review of EAs huge construction kit-game im Test | Seite 3
Review of EAs huge construction kit-game
Space
Depending on your style of play (aggressive, peaceful, or a mixture of both) your tribe will receive special abilities. This serves as motivation to play the game again in a different manner. It's also possible to jump into any of the five phases, including the final and most interesting phase of Spore: space. Now you can explore the galaxy freely and increase your empire by trade, war, colonies or by buying whole solar systems. 142 awards are waiting, enabling improvements for your space ship and keeping you motivated.
The barrier
But even in space there's no real goal. You have to motivate yourself or you will soon be bored. The lack of a storyline is one of the weaknesses of Spore. But game balance is an even bigger problem. Spore isn't balanced and that includes the controls; the right mouse button may rotate the view in one phase and control units in another. It's not possible to group units, it's hard to see your own units from the otherwise well positioned birds eye view, but hard to control them close-up. The map doesn't align itself to our point of view, so we often found ourselves moving in the wrong direction. The space phase uses the least intuitive interface we've seen in a long time. While Spore is almost too easy in the early phases it suddenly becomes unfair in the final stage, such as assigning several missions at once making them impossible to accomplish. What seemed to be prudent cautious expansion is swiftly punished by powerful enemies that crush your colonies one by one. There is also only one save game allowed which can be quite frustrating.
The network
If you are connected to the internet and once you have created an account, Spore will connect itself to other players. There is no multiplayer game, but Spore will populate your world with creatures made by others and make yours available to them. The network page offers the latest commentaries, and features certain creatures, buildings and vehicles. If you take Spore as a large construction kit where you can share your creations you will probably have more fun. Players of The Sims prefer creating houses or designing clothes to controlling the Sims, so it may have been logical to publish a piece of software that's less a game and more of a construction kit. Was this focus an ingenious decision? Time will tell.
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