Spore — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	A moderately enjoyable game overall. Lives up to most of my expectations ... until the space stage which is just broken. I'll keep that for later. I should note that I played twice until the status of "Omnipotent" which is supposed to be the greatest achievement in the game so I've seen most not to say all of the game. You probably already know about the cell, creature, tribal, civilization and space stages. So you must have heard about the 'extra content' that people can make. Just one thing you might not think about: all the content that people can make themselves is just eyecandy and serves no functional role in the game whatsoever. Sure you can customize your own creature but that's where it ends. Custom buildings are just eyecandy and you can fly around the space with a plain brick, it doesn't matter one bit. You can buy stuff for your spaceship such as weapons but guess what, these can't affect your spaceship's look in any way. Overall it doesn't really matter how cool your buildings and spaceship looks since it's a singleplayer game and noone will ever really see your 'empire' in it's 'glory'. Ok so I said that the space stage was broken. The problem is that you go from the rts kind of civ stage back to rpg kind of space stage. It feels degenerative. You have _only 1 ship_ sure you can add a very limited number of allies' ships to your 'fleet' (better term would be 'party') since they serve as useless satellites and don't help much in real combat. So once you have colonized a number of planets and allied with a number of other races you start to receive all kinds of stupid requests that require your immediate attention. So you'll be flying around in constant grind trying to save everyone. You don't have any sub-space communications so you need to fly over to someone's planet to be able to speak with them although everyone else can call you up from thousand parsecs away. Oh and dialogues just plain suck. There are no real politics that you have seen in games such as Alpha Centaury and the Civ series. You can't declare war (others can), you can't threaten anyone (others can) etc. HUD sucks too, you have no overview of how much spice any of your planets have collected so far so you just have to fly around randomly to find out. Sometimes a planet buys pink spice at a high price, another time you can't find a decent buyer anywhere so that means more flying around in random circles. I personally didn't find the planet customization much fun at all. I don't mean terraforming, not that this would have been any more fun. I mean the visual customization bit where you can build mountains and color the sky, ground, water whatever etc. Would have been much more fun if you could go back and live on that planet tho huh? But nope. Didn't find any such possibility. You can just bring (a limited number) of animals and plants onto one of your chosen planets, paint it purple and fly around it with your fancy spaceship. How dumb is that. This game could have lots of potential if a third party developer with half a brain made a complete overhaul mod for it and fixed the fundamental flaws that it has. Also it very much needs a multiplayer mode. Preferably with a persistant world and a low player limit (IIRC Freelancer used to have ~128 simultaneous players max and a persistant world - that was great!). Now a few positive things. I really liked how your actions in the previous game stage influenced how you'd need to play the next stage. That was cool. All the editors for the creature are pretty cool. What I like is that the parts you add to your creature's body actually affect gameplay and you have to make strategic choices there. Lots of visual variety in the game. It's difficult to appreciate all the little technological innovations they have put into the game since I don't understand them all and frankly they haven't talked about them in much depth either. But there are many and apparently that's where most of the effort went. I hope they'll one day share the technologies that were made for this game so others don't have to spend a decade to do similar things. Loading...
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