Spore Ends Up Failing

I was really liking Spore for a bit there, but I gotta say it fell off pretty quick. After the Creature Stage, you move onto the Tribal Stage, where you have a small town full of creatures that look like whatever you ended up with at the end of your creature stage plus some outfits and accessories that you can change around (most of which have no effect on your creatures whatsoever...lame). At this point the game is still reasonably fun, you have a few other tribes with which to interact, and you can sing to them and give them gifts to gain their favor or just kill 'em off. I did a little bit of both and it was fun for a while, then I advanced to the next stage.

The next stage is the Civilization Stage. The main issue I had at this point was that the game lost its initial appeal of evolving and changing around your creature while gaining new abilities etc. It began to feel like a mediocre RTS. I spent a lot of time designing buildings for my cities which I could barely see unless I zoomed in super close which was disappointing, seemed like it really wasn't worth all the effort. You can also create a land vehicle, boats and aircraft, and despite (once again) all the time one will take to design them, there isn't too much to do with them. I ended up just driving around collecting resources and blowing away other cities. It was pretty dull, and the next stage, the Space Stage, was no improvement.

I figured this could be pretty cool, advancing to space, exploring other galaxies! Nah, not really. This is probably the most boring of all...

...you just end up flying around from planet to planet doing menial tasks, abducting creatures, zapping the occasional enemy craft. All in all, it was not impressive. So while Spore has a really promising start, it really fails to deliver.

The graphics remain bright and bubbly and the sound effects are cool. The game has a good feel overall but I just wanted more from it. Eh, maybe I'll pick it up again some other time.