Spore is a steaming pile of crap.

I've waited for this game for years now. It was supposed to be the game to end all games, the final boss of the gaming industry, with amazing technology like animations that adapt to your creature design and unique procedurally generated worlds that you cannot predict. It was supposed to change everything.

I mean, it's fucking Maxis, they have never done wrong, Sim City was amazing (every iteration of it) and The Sims, were a bunch of good, addictive games. When you think of Will Wright, you think of innovation, and awesomeness.

Well, if you've played Spore, you probably don't need to read this, but I really need to tell you how crappy this game is.

First of all, Spore was supposed to be MASSIVE. An incredible accomplishment, a game that simulates the creation of life, and it's evolution from the cellular stage to the stage of space exploration and almost godliness. Well, you can finish it in about 5 hours, and it feels like one long tutorial. For the first few stages, all you will do is repeatedly click on things to kill them and then eat them (or eat shrubbery if you are a herbivore). And you do this again and again... and again and again, all the time gaining new (and extremely boring) new body parts to stick on your creatures. It is extremely boring, and at this part I basically just turned off the game after getting just bored with it. There is nothing else to do, there is no exploration and nothing intersting to see. Most of the creatures that other people made are dick monsters, by the way. I'm really curious how Maxis missed the fact that obviously most people will start off by creating a dick in the creature editor. It's just human nature. I did... my creature was a three shafted shitting dick nipple.

Every stage of the game is like a specific type of game (pacman style, 3rd person style, RTS, empire building, etc), only every stage is very badly detailed, and they dont' come across as very good instances of those styles at all. There are very few things that you can actually do, and for a game that was so hyped up for it's sandbox style gaming, it is VERY linear and very repetitive.

The later stages are absolutely unplayable, you get attacked every single moment and there is no possible way to enjoy the game (I heard they are releasing a patch to adress this). The final stage is just boring.

Even though the game has revolutionary animation and procedurally generated worlds and other tech goodies, the graphics are extremely bland. It feels like it came out 7 years ago. There are ways to create atmosphere and make a good impression even with low graphics quality, but Spore is just ugly on every level of detail. The trees, ground, sky, water are all ugly and bland, the colouring is dull and annoying and the foliage always gets in the way. Overall, it's very unappealing. Great going Maxis. I normally don't give a crap about graphics if the gameplay is good, but Spore is just... well it's so ugly it interferes with playability.

The music is good, at least (You can't go wrong with Brian Eno), but the sounds in the game are pretty annoying by themselves.

And guess what? There is almost zero replayability, since if you start from zero again, you go through all the stages and it plays just the same (you even get the tutorial bits again on every stage), only you can make a different creature. But there aren't that many parts to add to it, and it the end you will still be using the same parts as before (the good ones).

Also, it's almost impossible to make a really cool looking creature, in the end you will always have a googly eyed, either cute looking or goofy looking thing. And if you look at earlier versions of the game, you can see that they made it progressively cuter and cuter, probably to appeal to a younger group of people (children who don't give a crap about evolution or the origin of life or playing God).

Spore sucks.

If you want a good and intelligent sandbox game, go play Falling Sand, ahahaha.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I'm sure some people would like it though, but I can see why (most people are morons, after all). It's definately going to bring in obscene amounts of cash for Maxis, after leaving us real gamers and Maxis fans all extremely dissapointed. But that's how it goes with games.

Sim City 5 will probably be even crappier.