I’ve been playing Spore most nights since it arrived. I’ve played from the Cellular stage all the way through the Space stage. I think it is fair to say that I’ve seen everything that the game offers, and I find it very limited. I’m in full agreement with Yahtzee’s review of Spore and I will try not to duplicate too much of what he’s said.
I think what I was hoping for was deeper gameplay. At the Space stage, I was imagining a near full implementation of SimCity wrapped in Civilization wrapped in Masters of Orion. I wanted to be able to “get lost” in building cities or waging war. Instead, the city building is incredibly simplified (make sure you don’t put factories next to entertainment buildings and you’ll do fine). Waging war is as simple as flying to the enemy planet and zapping each colony’s city hall — on a planet with 3 colonies, you could take the whole planet over in under a minute.
Somehow your race evolved to the point that one and only one creature (you, of course) is capable of flying a space ship and protecting the entire species. They’ve apparently developed incredible cloning technology that allows them to transfer all of your thoughts to a new body, meaning you can never truly die. When your ship is blasted out of the sky, they build you a brand new one. However, for some reason, only one of these ships can exist in the universe at a time. The only way to have a fleet of ships is to ally with other species. (They are, unfortunately, also limited by the one-ship-per-universe rule.)
Not only are you the only hope for interstellar defense, but you are the sole creature capable of trading “spice”, a commodity that is harvested on each planet. To make money, you have to fly to a star system, zoom in so you can make contact with the planet, pick up some spice automatically (if it is one of your planets), make contact, ask them to trade, buy whatever spice they have for sale, and then decide whether or not the prices they’re willing to pay are good enough. Exit out of the trade screen, zoom out to space, travel to the next system, and repeat the whole cycle. It’s tedious. You can’t simply set up a trade route that actually trades Spice and makes you money. You can set up trade routes, but they’re for entirely different purposes: Once the trade route has existed long enough, you’re able to purchase the foreign planet for an additional price.
You’re also the only one capable of dealing with eco-disasters. Occasionally, a virus will break out and infect 5 animals on a planet. You must travel to the planet and zap those 5 animals with a laser — there’s no way for the people in the cities to do this themselves, apparently.
Ultimately, the level of micromanagement required by the game is not nearly deep enough to be interesting. As your dominion grows you are asked to come to the defense of colonies more frequently, to the point that every couple of minutes there is some disaster you have to deal with. Even if there were more compelling micromanagement, you would only get a one or two minutes with it before you were pulled away to deal with some other nonsense.
There is a patch for the Windows version of Spore that claims to address some of the concerns. It reduces the frequency of attacks by enemy species, as well as the frequency of eco-disasters. Even though the Mac version is the Windows version under emulation, the patch is not yet available for the Mac, so I can’t say first hand if it makes the game any more or less fun. However, without more fundamental changes in gameplay, I don’t have high hopes.
