Game: Spore
Developer: Maxis
Genre: Simulation
Releases: 2008 (PC)

The “backlog” is a term that wakes all kinds of emotions in gamers. I am aware of the fact that more things that can create a backlog than just video games, but in times of Steam, GOG.com, and various other platforms handing out really good games for little money, there is simply the urge is to buy. However, having the time to play all those shiny titles is a completely different matter. I do have a sizeable backlog of games that I would, could, and probably should tackle at some point, but after I decided to write what’s on my mind about the various games I played so far, things got more complicated. Sure, I could simply talk about the games I played in the past for memory, but as I always say “Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.” So, I re-play those games that I finished years ago to refresh my knowledge about them while reliving the good times I had with them; or crushing any positive feelings I harbored for them due to finally having taken off the rose-tinted glasses and expecting more from certain titles that I had a jolly good time with back in the day.

If you, dear reader, now think “Stalk, stop talking nonsense, and get to the point.”, … well, then you are probably right. Long story short: Since my aforementioned backlog was basically extended to whatever I played in the past and would like to write an article about, there are several games that I deemed done that suddenly plop up on the To-do-list again. One such title was “Spore”, a god-game/simulation/real-time strategy/action adventure-genre mix that was crazy ambitious back in the day and still crazy in general in present times. You create your own creature, from being nothing more than a cell up to conquering the planet you live on and engaging in interstellar travel and exploration. Imagine “Empire Earth”, but you make your own creature, you have more of a timeframe to play through, and instead of playing a strategy game (at least for most of the time), you play a simulation in which you can change, form and evolve the creature and the assets later down the road in various creative ways. “Spore” is definitely a unique experience, however, it certainly has its ups and downs. Fortunately, the game is divided into five stages that I can go through and structure the article with, so let’s talk “Spore”:

The first stage in “Spore” is the Cell Stage, where you play your species-to-be on a microbiologic level. The Cell Stage is a charming start that has an actual impact on your creation in the on-coming stage since you pretty much decide what your species will eat later on by setting the path on a cellular level. But let’s start at the beginning: You start your journey into “Spore” as a cell that cannot do anything at the start apart from moving and eating. By consuming specks of food you gain DNA, which you can use to “evolve” your cell with the various upgrades you can find. The logic is as simple as it would be in actual nature, just way faster: You attach whatever you deem helpful for the survival of your creature since its basic function is to eat and procreate. If you choose to be a herbivore, your targets are small green flakes swimming around in the primordial soup. Since you do not want to interact with the other creatures, but they mostly want to eat you, some basic defenses are in order. Whether you apply spikes to your body as a deterrent, produce electricity like an eel, or simply have a small speed boost in form of fins to flee the predator is completely up to you. However, if you crave the meat of other beings, you can choose to be a carnivore, in which case you can decide to consume the red specks wobbling around or hunt down other cells as your prey. Apart from your jaws that can be used to bite the opponent, some of the same functions that are helpful for the herbivores can help you hunt down your food. More speed due to fins means you can catch up with other cells easier, while the same spikes that protect the squishy bodies can be used to inflict damage when placed more … aggressively.

Even when I was writing this part, I thought that it did not sound like you can do hours of it due to the lack of … well, something original to do. And thankfully, Maxis was aware of that: The Cell Stage can be cleared in about 10 minutes, which is fine as a start and serves as a solid introduction into some of the gameplay mechanics to come. Gaining points to evolve your creature to your liking is something that you first encounter in the Cell Stage and the choice of options to customize are fairly limited exactly because new players need to get a feel for what is in store for them. The Cell Stage introduces the first few parts to emerge out of the water with and, as mentioned before, sets the course for what your creature is capable of eating once it arrives on land. You can choose to let your creature become an omnivore by switching the mouths through the various iterations your cell will go through, or simply attaching multiple mouths to eat with to one cell, but it is perfectly possible to let your creature only have one possible food source and still play without any problems. In my opinion, the Cell Stage was a fine introduction to the game and sparked interest for the things to come.

The real meat of the game is, at least in my opinion, the Creature Stage. After your cell evolved to have some legs, it moved out of the water to continue living on land, but that brings its fair share of difficulties to overcome. After the Cell Stage, you gain some final points and can make your creature somewhat functional, albeit knowing that the start will be rocky. Your body parts now all gain new abilities, which you will need to do the two major options “Spore” gives you when it comes to other species: Befriend or hunt. Both solutions do work and you can decide to never harm any creature in the creature stage if you do not want to. For that, you can do some basic rituals to show the other that you mean no harm. The options for that are singing, dancing, posing, or charming. Each of those interactions can have a level from 1 to 5 depending on how good your body part is in that area. For example, to allow your creature to sing it needs any mouth component, but to have a high-level ability certain mouths are better than others. Feet are required to dance, arms are needed for posing, and you can only use charm if your creature has fur, feathers, or something else to put on show. The process of befriending whatever creature you have in front of you just comes down to imitating the action they use and meeting their “expectation level”. Doing so will give you DNA, which you can then use to create new features for the next generation, while your being becomes ever more intelligent and crafty.

Obviously, if there is a way to befriend other species, you can also be rather unfriendly to them. For that, you have the option of battling whatever sad creature encounters you. Again, you have four abilities, but rather than using them in conjunction with something, you can just activate them at the most opportune moment and deal damage to your target. If your creature has every ability available, it will be able to bite, charge, strike, and spit. Bite is a rather weak attack that comes with a short cooldown and can therefore be spammed; however, you need a mouth component to bite anything. Charge allows your creature to run in the direction of the target at full speed and stun it upon impact, and it is granted by feet as well as horns. Strike is a high-damaging attack with a long cooldown that can hit multiple targets, which needs arms or spikes to be unlocked. And finally, Spit is a ranged attack that deals damage over time while also stopping charging creatures, and is granted by special glands you can buy for your creature. With that arsenal, you can fight various species, bring them to extinction, and gain some precious DNA to upgrade your creature with in the process.

Now, I already mentioned that I liked the Creature Stage the most and that comes down to the crazy variety of monsters you can make in the creature creator. Maxis did a good job when it comes to the number of creature parts in the game since you not only have enough material to do incredibly wacky stuff with but the creator is also easy enough to understand that pretty much any player can get into creating their monsters immediately. There are a few things to keep in mind when building creatures, mainly that you have a certain limit of parts you are allowed to use and that there is a maximum for both thinness and thickness of body parts; but other than that you can go wild. This is also the one mode that makes me re-install the game just to have half an hour of fun designing some monstrosity before I de-install the game again. The creature creation in “Spore” was just its best feature, since it’s easy to understand and fun to work with. I can remember booting up “Spore” with my friends and just making some doofus of an animal, which was not only great fun but probably still works in 2021 despite the age of the game. Unfortunately, the game was not designed for you to stay in the creature stage indefinitely, since you will run out of tasks to do and therefore progress into the next stage of the game.

The so-called “Tribal Stage” comes right after your creature developed enough brainpower to form the earliest stages of civilization. A new window opens in which you are tasked to give some clothing to whatever species you created and right after that you find yourself with a small base and the task to gather food. In the Tribal Stage, instead of DNA, you use food to buy upgrades. New upgrades for your base? Food. Getting a new baby in the tribe to grow your numbers? Food. I would list more things to buy with food here, but that is basically it. The Tribal Stage just consists of you gathering enough nourishment to keep the bellies of your creatures full and to upgrade both your tribe and the base to whatever level you want or need. But this stage does not only revolve around your battle against starvation: Other species also managed to gain enough intelligence to form tribes, and they must be befriended or annihilated, exactly like in the Creature Stage. This time around both war and peace can be brought by the usage of tools, which means musical instruments for the peace-loving species, while weapons can bring down foes and their buildings alike if you consider war as an option. And that is all you need to know about the Tribal Stage: It ends as soon as you finished interacting with five other tribes, but whether this was done peacefully, by war, or a mix of the two options is completely up to you. I dislike the Tribal Stage since there is so little to do: There is food in abundance, so I never really struggle to keep my tribe alive even at maximum capacity, and going to war with the other tribes can be as easy as equipping the entire tribe with weapons and then catching the opposing tribe off-guard by picking some hunting party as my target. Granted, there is the option of increasing the difficulty, so maybe the Tribal Stage becomes challenging when played on “Hard”, but in my opinion, this is just busywork with little impact overall.

After the disappointment that is the Tribal Stage, our self-made species grows even more intelligent, which brings us to the Civilization Stage. If you liked creating things in the creature creator, hold on tight because we have to create an entire army of assets for their city. Starting with the center building, there are houses, factories, and entertainment buildings to design with the newly introduced building creator. Also, we need military vehicles on the land, the sea, and in the skies, adding even more things to create with the aptly called vehicle creator. And we need all those things because the game introduces yet another resource we need to farm: Spice. In fact, the Civilization Stage could be best described with “Spice Wars”, since that is basically what you are going to do for the entire phase. The entire map is full of Spice geysers, which our military vehicles can claim for our civilization and therefore gain us more resources to build more vehicles and buildings to be more efficient in gaining Spice, which in turn gives us more resources to work with, et cetera ad nauseam. The only forces that are stopping the player from simply taking over the entire planet and therefore all the Spice reserves are other civilizations trying to do the same. They will try to increase their Spice production as well, which stands in opposition to you controlling all the resources, which means that you can either ally the other nation(s) or blast them off the map. That system sounds familiar, right? In the Civilization Stage, you can ally others by making them gifts or opting to buy their cities, which in the end might even cause them to acknowledge your power and ask to join your empire out of free will. The more explosive option is to go at war with your military vehicles, which you can further support by simply sending bombs to the opposing city as a persuasive tool that just so happens to also flatten buildings quite well. And that is it, basically. If you like to create your own little nation, you will probably spend quite some time in the creation tools, but the gameplay of the stage itself feels lacking. Click a vehicle, order it to attack, retreat when receiving too much damage, and eventually the city is conquered. But the Civilization Stage is just another prelude to probably the longest stage the game has to offer.

The final frontier can be conquered in the Space Stage; and since the player has to be in the phase for the rest of the game time, they fluffed up the content in this particular stage. At the start of the Space Stage, you get to build yet another vehicle in form of a spacecraft that allows you to travel the rest of the universe. All of the sudden, the game mode changes from you being the god-like player that steers his creatures to a scenario in which you play a single space cadet of your nation. You get the glorious mission of flying the first spacecraft your nation has produced, and since there seem to be intelligent lifeforms out in the vast nothingness, you get to find and contact them to create bridges between the races. You eventually get to find other lifeforms, at which point you come to the age-old question of “friend or foe”. You can be a warmonger and start new conquests on a galactic level, you can trade with the other planets and gain more resources that way. On top of that, you have a scanning tool that allows you to analyze unknown flora and fauna and add them to the Sporepedia. Using Colony-kits, you can colonize planets to farm more Spice, which can be turned into more Sporebucks, which can be turned into more everything else, which in turn can be used to farm more Spice, you already know the drill. At this point, I have a confession to make: I have never completed the Space Stage of “Spore”; in fact, I have never even managed to play that stage for longer than half an hour before closing the game due to massive boredom. “Spore” was brilliant for the creature creator, and I am pretty sure that many other people that played the game would agree. The Space Stage is so far away from that fun mode of designing creatures that it did not even feel like I was playing the same game anymore. Instead, I am now flying a spaceship, aggressively scrolling with the mouse wheel to leave and enter solar spaces and planet atmospheres, working on completing some in-game achievement system that rewards me new titles whenever I did something but never feeling right, meaningful, or even fun. Reaching Space in Spore is normally the end of my journey, since at that point I probably wasted about one and a half hours of game time in the Tribal and Civilization Stages, waiting for a part of the game that I look forward to even less.

This is not how your journey in “Spore” has to go. In fact, I am sure that there are just as many people that like flying through space and doing something completely different as there are people that wished the entire game would be content for the Creature Stage. However, it is not like Maxis did not know what they had created, since they were clearly aware of how good the creature editor was: The “Spore” trial version that is offered on the Spore website consists of only the creature creator and nothing more, which means that they had high hopes in that thing alone to win people over. The creator was even used for 2011’s “Darkspore“, in which players could use a slightly altered version of the creature creator to make their player character. “Spore” received two DLCs for exactly those the strongest two stages of the game: More parts to make your creatures with are available in the “Creepy & Cute Parts Pack“, and more content for the Space Stage with the “Galactic Adventures” DLC. But all of this is just bonus info. The matter at hand is: Is “Spore” worth buying? If you want my answer, it would be yes. The game goes for 1.99€ on Steam during sales, which is honestly a good enough price for the Creature Stage alone. I am currently at over 20 hours of playtime, just because I find myself re-installing the game, having a little fun with it, binning it again, and then repeating that process a year later. “Spore” was a new concept back in 2008, and even nowadays there is not really anything quite like it available, so if you want to have some fun time creating your own species and seeing them thrive throughout the ages, give “Spore” a try.