I’ve been playing Spore for a couple of days now. So far it seems it gets more difficult, and frustrating as you advance through the stages; from the Cell stage to the Space stage.
Lets go through them all…
The first one, Cell stage. This one is the easiest. You start as a cell, eating plankton(as a Carnivore), or seaweed(as a Herbavore), with avoiding to be eaten yourself. Occasionally you mate to evolve and grow your cell until eventually, you’re big enough to sprout legs and walk on land in the Creature stage.
The Creature stage, 2nd stage. This one was really difficult for me, with one of those difficulties being to slowly evolve my cell into what is known as a dragon. I suck at sculpting. 🙁
The 2nd thing was finding food. As a Carnivore, you have to either hunt the species of other nests and eventually wipe them out, or eat from a corpse. But what I don’t get is there’s hardly any consequence. If you don’t wipe them out, why don’t they grow with you into the next stage instead of having brand new creatures?
And there’s the impressing of other nests to become your ally that pretty much requires your existing allies. You got to hope your social skills are higher or at par with the one you’re trying to impress.
And if that’s not enough, you got to live in fear of Epic creatures randomly roaming around, terrorizing other nests. And finding these bones to evolve your creature and your species.
Eventually though, and I’ve finally completed it, your creature learns how to use tools and advances into the Tribal stage.
Tribal stage, 3rd stage. Your species now can talk due to your bigger brains. You’re somewhat more civilized than in the Creature stage, working as a team to bring down a nest and taking the food back to the village, or sending a few of them fishing.
The object of the Tribal stage is to keep a good supply of food, as it’s your currency of this stage. And also, to befriend or destroy the other villages. As you advance, you can expand your tribe. It’s a good idea to do so especially when one of them decides to attack your village.
You can have up to 12 tribe members, which includes the Chieftain. Once you’re able to complete this stage, your creatures will prepare to live life as sentient beings, and take over the planet. Then you will move on to Civ stage.
Civilization stage, 4th stage. One thing I don’t get is every city, is occupied with your species. Did you wipe them all out in the Tribal stage? Or by completing the Tribal stage, show your dominance and tell the other creatures to leave your planet?
If you did good in Tribal stage, your city will be a Economist city, All you have to do is pay your way into the hearts of the other cities, establish trade routes, spam hordes of vehicles and get them going to butter them up enough to buy the city, and boom, you win easily. And soon, you’re ready for the final stage as your species gets to work on a spaceship, for you!
Space stage, 5th stage. Depending on what you have selected, a ship comes out of the tower, and you control it! You’re put on a series of tests to get a feel of the new stage, and eventually sent on missions by your homeworld to colonize other planets…. and that’s where things get rather overwhelming for me. Soon as you leave your planet, you can see your sun and the planets revolving around it. Further out still and you get the big picture. And I mean big. Thousands, if not millions of suns and planets await you in this humongous Spore galaxy.
The object of the Space stage is pretty much that you sell spice to other planets to make them your allies.. or destroy them. You can terraform planets, and make them your own by colonizing them. You can go anywhere you want, as long as it’s within range of your warp drive system. But don’t go too far as there’s hostile aliens out there who have an itchy trigger finger.
You’re supposed to earn badges; lots of them. They will help increase your ship’s weapon systems, range of the star systems you can warp to, and get new terraforming tools.
Occasionally, on some planets, you can get objects popping up on the planet that you can use your sonar to find them, and your abduction beam to pull them into your ship’s cargo hold.
And on random, but quite frequent occasions, your planet or your colonies are under attack by space pirates. And you alone have to defend your species. It gets rather annoying.
I found the Space stage very hard and frustrating without a helping hand to show where to go and what to do. It just…fucking pisses me off how I hear “Oh god you suck I’ve completed this game in 6 hours!”. IF it was an FPS like FarCry with a god mode cheat, then yes.
Because here you are, all alone, in space, trying to colonize. And being told to colonize 6 planets, AND have to be near the center of the galaxy. The fuck?!
But, amongst the hate, there is parts I like and found so adorable for words. Parts in the Creature stage, Tribal stage, and Space stage.
For the Creature stage, it’s funny how other nest creatures look at you suspiciously, if your a friend or a foe. And if you go idle on your creature, he’ll turn around and smile at you.
The Tribal stage… so hilarious. I don’t know what’s more funny with looking at your tribe. The “get owned!” song, them shoving eachother and laughing about it, or hearing them laugh evilly when hunting.
And, the Space stage, when your hovering over your cities or colonies, watching your species cheer and dance when they see you. Or hearing the frightened screams of creatures when they see your ship and run.