Game Review - Spore

Will Wright’s latest brain child, Spore allows the player to take control of a life form all the way from a cell through to conquering the galaxy. An ambitious boast that, sadly, does not live up to the hype. While Spore does technically do all that it claims, it fails to make the journey a compelling or fun experience.

The cell stage is, by far, the least enjoyable of all of the stages. You swim around eating random bits of food until you get bigger, then you eat some more. Stage complete.

The creature stage is where the game actually has some aspect of fun involved. This is where you really get to customize and evolve your creature into some cool and unique. The stage consists mostly of looking around for new parts to evolve with and either befriending or killing other species. This quickly becomes tedious and boring as little to no skill is involved. Succeeding or failing is based almost strictly on stats and death has almost no consequence.

After sufficient evolution, your creature gains sentience and moves onto the tribal stage. The tribal stage amounts to a very simplified real time strategy game with some basic resource gathering and unit control. The stage again consists of either befriending or wiping out rival races. As with the creature stage, leave your skill at the door, your micro is no good here. Build up a pile of resources, send a wave followed by another, win.

After wiping out the other tribes and becoming the dominant species of the planet, you’ll move onto the second to last stage, civilization. In this mode, you continue with your basic resource gathering and begin building up your city. Throughout the stage, your goal will be to conquer the other cities either through social or military victory (sound familiar?). Yawn.

Having done all you can on your own planet, you look to the stars. Space, the final frontier (yeah, that was lame.) Easily the most complicated stage, the space stage seems to be where the game really begins. Unfortunately, it’s so poorly thought out and so incredibly bloated with features, it’s just not any fun. You can set up colonies in other solar systems to expand your empire. The colonies will mine spice for you which you can then collect and trade for a profit. This process is so painful it hurts (I’m on a roll.) You have to manually fly to each planet in each solar system in order to collect its spice. From there, you have to fly from planet to planet looking for the best deal. Did I mention there are multiple kinds of spice? How about that the prices change so that even after you find a good place to sell, you’ll just have to look again later? I could go on and on about this, but I think you get the point.

Finally, from a technical standpoint, the game is buggy as shit. Model loading issues, audio corruption, and even crashes. It doesn’t even look all that good.
To sum up, as with most games, it’s worth a play, but wait for the bargain bin on this one.

Game Review - Dead Space

There's a quote from a poster on Kotaku that I really like: "Hating EA is so last year." It's really true. EA saw their market share steadily decreasing after repeatedly fucking their customers in the ass and releasing shitty products and franchise updates. Realizing they needed to reconnect with their fans, EA set to work on creating some compelling titles including *GASP* new IPs. Dead Space comes as a result of this.

Dead Space is a survival dismemberment horror game where you dismember enemies to kill them by dismemberment. Got it? The game really only has one cool feature and it tends to get old before too long; shoot off the limbs of enemies and they die. Rinse and repeat. When you first start, this is awesome. I loved the game for the first few hours until I realized that it wasn't going to get any better.

As for the "horror" part of survival horror, the devs just missed the point. Survival horror, and horror in general, really, is about suspense and the possibility of danger. It's about surprising the player when he's not expected it and doing nothing when he is. In Dead Space, it's always expected. You always know when the monsters are coming and they can never really sneak up on you. The other problem with their take on horror is their lack of a safe zone. There's no area in the game where you can relax and let down your guard. Without that, you become overloaded by the input and desensitized to its effects. In short, it becomes the norm and you no longer care.

To be fair, Dead Space is an incredibly polished game and does what it does well. Unfortunately, it missed the mark on a lot of the important aspects of its genre. Overall, I'd recommend this as a rental, for sure, but pass on the 60 dollar price tag.