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.

Spore

I started playing Spore this weekend and I'm enjoying it despite the fact that my creature keeps getting eaten and starving to death...
The game starts you as a microscopic organism and takes you through various levels of evolution, ending in space I believe. At the moment, I've gotten my guy outta the water and onto the land.

Here's a bit of my evolution so far...

One of the first stages of my on-land evolution.

Gave myself some wings and a horn-esque thing on my nose to impress.

I decided to go for kinda a mix between a dinosaur and an insect for this stage.

This is my current state. More insect-like than anything I guess. No, I have no idea why I put an eye on his chest...

I haven't really gotten the hang of the game quite yet. It seems pretty cool so far but I think I need to learn how to better customize my creature. There's a ton of options (arms, legs, pincers, ears, mouths, wings etc. etc. etc.). Each one costs a certain amount of DNA points and holds its own benefits such as the ability to impress and/or eat other creatures. I feel like my strategy from this point on is going to be to focus on either impressing or killing, not try to balance both of them.

As for the look and feel, the graphics are bright and colorful as are the sound effects and music. The game contains a wide variety of other creatures to encounter, all of which are very different in shape and size. The controls are simple, mostly just point-and-click and a couple number keys for various abilities. All in all, Spore is looking pretty good.