Spore, Sim-City/Civilization on Steroids

I hadn’t heard much about Spore until today. I’ve watched a video demonstrating the game and was floored. From the minds that brought us Sim City and The Sims, this game is bound to be pretty intense and feature rich with regards to game/player interaction. Here’s a quick run down:

The game starts you out as a microorganism eating green cells and avoiding brown ones. As you zip around completing this basic task, you begin to grow and gain access to customization. For example, you could add cilia to help you move faster, or a proboscis to help you eat quicker; you can also reshape your organizim in some cool ways. Your organism evolves and eventually becomes a creature that can move around on land where you hunt prey and avoid predators. You mate and create young which appears to unlock more customization (evolution) to your creature, allowing you to modify shape; physical features; etc. The key thing to save for and upgrade is the creature’s brain, which allows them to become more ‘aware’ to unlock advanced customization.

In time, the game becomes a tribal game where you war with other tribes and begin to upgrade huts and dance at fires. From there it eventually advances to a civilization game where you posess a city and create/upgrade buildings. Other cities war with you and you with them. Your goal is then to achieve world domination. Yet there are more upgrades. You can choose to learn to colonize underwater or create a space ship to explore your solar system. You can zip around your home planet and abduct creatures and take them to an undeveloped planet to shape and colonize it. As you continue to advance in level you can gain a ‘hyperdrive’ to allow you to explore the galaxy and find other populated worlds with completely different physiologies, planetary shape, personalities, etc. How you interact with these worlds is up to you. Do you go for a abduction/cross-breeding route? Or do you opt for mass first-contacts and drop monoliths all over the place? Do you blow up planets? Or do you opt for more diplomatic means?

The choices are yours and thats what makes this game so exciting. In addition to doing your own thing, you have the ability to download other users’ building/species designs to be implemented in your own game as either opposition or additions to your civilization.

All in all, Spore looks sexy. I will definately be picking this up come Quarter 4, 2006. For a bit more information regarding this game, check out GameSpy’s article.