Okay, my review so far (broken up by stages).
Cell stage: It’s fun, very simple. I found the larger cells somewhat annoying, but that was probably due to oversight on increasing speed on my part (and doing it the first time on hard). I felt slow until I got the jet part in the later cell era and had trouble catching stuff. It was colorful and fun, a little too short for my liking however. I actually screwed up here a bit, I wanted to be an omnivore, but I accidentally went carnivore which leads me to…
Creature Stage: First off, I think the one most simultaneously charming and annoying thing about this game is your actions in the previous era affect your creature. Since I accidentally went carnivore and I was solidly in that range I had to use diplomacy a LOT in order to get into the middle range, this became difficult once I realized only predator/carnivore parts are available to creatures which somewhat stifles sing, and as I wanted to do omnivore I was stuck with my proboscis (and an extra mouth eventually) for the duration. Because I was spending all my DNA on social stuff I relied on wings. And let me tell you, once you get the hang of them the wings are one of the most fun and useful parts available.
One aspect that was a tie between fun and annoying was the pack aspect. Once you befriend a tribe (or within your own tribe) you have to play the goddamn social mini-game AGAIN and you can get members in your pack. This is necessary if you want to succeed, but it gets annoying because they don’t follow you well if they get attacked and you want to run away, so if you were using a packmate from another nest because it had attributes you desired you are forced to trek all the way back to their nest to get them. Couple this with the fact that it’s damn near impossible to find which nest you want and it can get old, fast. It seems to have a really strange difficulty curve as well. It goes from really easy, to really, really frustrating, to really easy after your last milestone (or maybe that was due to the carnivore screw up).
Tribal Stage: I don’t like the flak this one has been getting. It was pretty fun, though it is definitely simplistic. The battling became easier once I realized every weapon has a special move (spears do this weird charge and spread out, stone axes do a rapid-strike and fire does… never used that one). If you plan to play aggressive the best strategy seems to be to wait for them to attack you and then retaliate since I found it exceedingly difficult to just bull-rush a fully populated village. The music/social was good, they made it easier than the tribal stage, maybe a little too far that way, but it was good. I don’t know if this is because I was balanced or what but every tribe started out hating me and I had to give them a gift of 10 food (quite a bit) in order to get them to the point where I could play for them. Maybe a thoroughly herbivorous character wouldn’t have that, but it seemed unnecessary to be hated all the time, especially when neutral characters also steal your stuff and raid your village (and then get mad when you retaliate…).
Overall it was fun, I died twice, once because the entire map decided to triple-team me, and once because I tried to bull-rush the last village (hence my comment), once I knew exactly which village would spawn when (and where) and what they had (not randomized every retry) it became pretty easy.
Civ: If I have one piece of advice for everyone playing Spore… DO NOT play economic. It was so boring. Though there was a certain charm at first to buying out the opponent’s towns instead of resorting to force (or force conversion) it eventually lost its charm when I realized the entire economic game relied on sitting back and waiting (may I add you’re helpless?) then bribing the other factions to like you, opening a trade route, hoping the town you’re trading with doesn’t get taken over (or cause another faction to hate and attack you).
You also have to be careful because taking over spice derricks in the economic way (bribing the employees) lowers your standing, so if you’re stuck on a four town landmass you have to keep saving up money and bribing them until you know they won’t declare war for annexing their derricks. You also get powers you can use, economic powers cost money (it may be the same for all but I’m not sure) but I never used them except for the “I’m bored value” when I was about to win once, they would be useful in a pinch, except for the fact that the only time you’re in a pinch in economics is when you don’t have money and you’re going to be using that for bribes, not using a short-lived power to temporarily save yourself.
To be fair when you take over a town you can take over the aspect of the town (religious or war) and produce those vehicles to make it easier, all of the other nations that spawned in mine were religious, and I didn’t want to risk getting tempted to mobilize and accidentally shoot myself to the top tier for space, if it were both I could have balanced it out but not one war guy spawned oddly enough. If you’re not worried about playing through all three sections (green, blue, red) then it may be good to acquire a town ASAP and then produce war/religion units.
All in all this section was really easy and beyond boring, at least with my setup.
Space; I haven’t finished it yet, but so far my feelings are mixed. It’s almost a mix of the creature stage and the civ stage. It’s more about money and such but at the same time you directly control a single vessel (though you can get ships for a fleet to help you, much like the packs in the creature stage). The interface is initially clunky, but you get used to it once you figure out where the tabs are. It reminds me of EVE Online with the complexity stripped out and the factions forcing you to take their quests. Oh, I didn’t mention that? Every five freaking seconds one of your planets or an ally sends out a distress signal, either the planet’s ecosystem is destabilizing and you have to smoosh the little diseased critters or you have to fend off a pirate invasion. Not to mention the amount of repetition to build up your bank account to buy anything worthwhile makes the grind in WoW look conservative.
It also seems overly annoying to get colonies. To found colonies you need money, no surprise, but to get money you either have to do the above quests or wait for spice to be harvested, trek all the freaking way to the other side of the galaxy and sell it (and pray they didn’t lower the price), and then wait some more. This especially happens early on when you can actually exhaust the amount of available quests. Not to mention at this stage for me 250k is ludicrous and the make a hospitable planet for your colony you meed at least 250k, oftentimes more (150k for every climate changing device, which sometimes you need multiple of, and 97k for the colony thing, 150k if you get it from your home planet and not an ally).
So that’s (most of) the middle tree. Overall I’m enjoying it, but I think they could have reduced some of the waiting and general annoyances. And creating stuff is definitely fun.
