Developed by the now closed Maxis Software, Spore is a life simulation game created by the famed game director of the sims and sim city, Will Wright. The idea behind the game was that you would create your own creature, and evolve it from a single celled organism to a galactic civilization.
The game was hyped to hell and back as a huge development in gaming technology, and for the gameplay itself. When it was released... it got less than stellar reviews. Part of it was due to Electronic Arts putting an extremely harsh DRM on the game that made it so you could only install it 5 times. (EA still hasn't learned from this, has technically gotten worse about it, but we've just kinda come to accept it.) But the biggest blow is the gameplay itself. The game is very shallow in all but the last section of the game's story mode, and in the actual creature creator.
The thing is though, the math and coding behind the biggest part of the game is still very solid. If someone were to take that part of it, and make a sequel with it and enhance the modes, it could be a really fantastic game.
What I'm referring mainly to, is the spore creature creator.
The Spore Creature Creator is incredibly powerful. It is very easy to understand and control, and gives an extreme amount of variability and control to the player, whose only limit is their imagination, and the available parts.
The animations of the game were designed to be able to account for all different kinds and configurations of creatures; no arms or legs, 4 legs, 6 legs, a dozen arms, three legs... Granted there is a crap ton of model clipping, but all things considered that's a minor issue. Hell it is kind of expected when you have a dozen legs flopping around.
The Spore Creature Creator is a nearly timeless piece of mechanics. New games with character customization will come, but no one will reach the Spore level of customization without basically copying it. The only way it could be more timeless is with a larger library of parts to use. Different mouths, eyes, ears, hands, feet, et cetera.
People are still playing Spore just for the creature creator, using it to create artistic beasts and other creatures. All the work done on the creature creator was well worth it, and is a mechanic that SHOULD be built upon.
The main game itself though... the best part is the creating, and the game feels somewhat more like an obstacle at times.
The game has 5 modes to go through: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space.
The cell stage is the second best of the modes; primarily because it is short, but also because its mechanics are simple but sound. You play as a cell, where your goal is to eat as much as possible, and to not be killed by other cells. You also collect parts in order to evolve your cell, giving it different abilities, like new forms of propulsion or attacks like poison or lightning. This stage is very short though... only about 10-15 minutes. At the end of it, you evolve a brain and legs, and venture onto shore.
Originally, there was an underwater stage planned, where you played as a fish. It was scrapped when they couldn't figure out a good way to have it be controlled (honestly just having it be WASD for movement and right mouse button for direction would've done perfect). some people like to argue that if the stage was in the game it would've been better, but given the rest of the game I doubt that'd be the case.
The Creature stage is where all of the creature's evolution takes place. It is now a land mammal, and the goal is to befriend or cause the extinction of a lot of different species. You get parts for doing this, as well as scavenging around. This is the third best stage; you play with the creature creator here, but the creature stage is mostly an obstacle to making your awesome creature. The fighting and befriending mechanics become repetitive, and start a common thread for the modes: you win if you just have more people. The easiest way to befriend races is to not let them call friends for a dance off while you have your posse. Fighting is just spamming your 4 attacks when possible... no strategy, just go nuts. The game in no way encourages build diversity either; just get the maximum level of the skills as soon as possible to end the stage and soon as possible. and unfortunately those skills are tied to parts in the creature creator. So, either you lose how you want your creature to look, or you go in with a deoptimized build that is just more annoying than fun.
The tribal stage follows the creature, and it is the second worst stage. Also you no longer get to change your creature, just add some clothes to it. In the stage, you must kill or befriend several other tribes. The mechanics change here though, and for the worse. The game switches to a real time strategy mode, though strategy is in the hardest of quotation marks. You control 6-12 villagers. Befriending works the same as in the previous stage, but is even easier and is just tedious. Destroying the villages isn't fun because you have worse than no control over the fight. You do not have finesse when controlling the tribe; unless you want to pause the game to issue individual orders, your best bet is to tell them to attack something, and then let them auto attack until the village is dead and you can burn down the hut. There is no point to destroying weapon shacks or stealing food, you win just by going in with bigger numbers and more button mashing.
Civilization is the worst stage in the game. It is still a real time strategy, but now mixed with city management (just put buildings in optimal positions then never touch it again). You have to conquer the world to move on to the next stage. You get three unit types: land, water, and air vehicles. The best thing about the stage is the ability to design these units yourself. The worst thing is that the stats just don't matter. Just give it a body, something that makes it go, and a gun, and it will have the exact same effectiveness as any other unit. You want to win fights? Just have the unit be slow, you'll win easily with more health or firepower. Or, just build up a large amount of units and steamroll everyone. The stage usually ends with just a horde of planes demolishing the last city. Unless you are playing the economic game, in which case it is incredibly slow and uninteractive. Civilization is the worst stage in the game, beating out the tribal stage by being so boring and shallow.
But, following the worst stage comes the best stage, Space. There is so much to do in space: trade with other empires, establish colonies, terraform planets, conquer other empires that won't stop asking for tribute, visit the galactic core... (and there is actually something there, those of you coming hot off the heels of No Man's Sky; and what is there is awesome and worth the difficult trip.) There is even a gigantic hostile alien force called the Grox to fight... or, attempt to befriend them and cause the ENTIRE GALAXY to go to war with you. The playstyles in this mode are extremely varied as well, but encourage trying other forms as well. You could be an extremely peaceful race... but when the zealots come asking for tribute for the 50th time, you're going to want to make it stop permanently. As a warfaring race you'll also want to make friends, who will also go to war alongside you.
Space mode got even better with the release of Galactic Adventures. In it, your captain can beam down to planets to go on adventures created by others. These adventures can vary in quality, but the gameplay change was very good, and brought new and interesting mechanics, that did actually introduce some strategy to the game's fighting and character building.
Unfortunately, Spore is now a mostly abandoned game, outside those still making use of the powerful creature creator. Spore had sequels, but not any that expanded on what the core of the game was. Darkspore was an action rpg that improved the fighting gameplay a lot, at the expense of only being able to slightly modify premade creatures.
Spore's problems stemmed from an idea: progressing from a single cell to a space-fairing race. If everything was thought through well enough, that wouldn't have been something a player could do in an afternoon, but something that took a lot more time.
The game mechanics are shallow and simple because the game wants you to hurry up and get to space, where the meat really is. The game would've been better if the yadda yadda yadda'd the tribal and civilization stages... but improving by omitting isn't good design.
Despite being significantly more fun than No Man's Sky, it and Spore share the same problem: they both have the mindset that whatever comes next is more fun than what you're doing now (or it should be). What it should have been is a mindset of "what you are doing right now is fun; what comes next can wait until you are done having fun here."
Each stage in Spore should have been expanded to the point where they are a game all on their own.
As a Cell, getting to the top level should mean you can go on land... or stick around and advance some more as a cell, meeting other life that is becoming more powerful in their niches, as you refine yours.
In the creature stage, there should be more options than just gaining intelligence... like, increasing the size of the pack to become a clan, and then a horde, more along the lines of the Xenomorphs or the bugs from Starship Troopers. Become the apex not just through intelligence, but through other means as well.
The tribal stage (and civilization stage) shouldn't have been RTS's. These pull you away from your intimate connection with the species, and just make you a god controlling string puppets that hate their strings. Instead, they should've been direct control over the chieftan/mayor, and become gamepaly based around the same mechanics introduced in creature, but built upon. Like, evolving the hunter/gatherer gameplay of the tribal stage, creating farms and agriculture as the tribe progresses in size naturally towards civilization. In civilization, political maneuvering as the mayor should take center stage... when you aren't on the front lines of war. If you are a religious country you should create the religion you espouse, and have to deal with splinter groups and the like as you try to unify the world under your religious roof.
Or, if you went a different route in the creature stage, choosing to become the apex monster, then you work to unite all the clans under your rule, to eventually reach the stars under the power of evolution.
Each of the stages were developed in a way that made them more like minigames, separate from each other. They should've been developed as a part of the same system, just with more pieces added on as life evolves.
I said at the beginning that Spore has an extremely strong mechanical foundation that a sequel that expanded on the original would be really good. And I fully stand by that. The hardest part of the game was completed; the creature creator is brilliant, and is what truly sold the game. If they were to take that, and put it in a game with improved gameplay mechanics, the game would be amazing.
