everyday gamer

The end of the Creature phase signals the beginning of the Tribal Phase and the finalized look of the creatures used as avatars for subsequent Spore sections. The creature phase is used to demonstrate the beginnings of animal pack mentality such as hunting and socializing.  In actual execution, the phase is very similar to a single player MMO.

The Tribal phase begins with a cute cinematic of the creature gaining sentience and raising a stick in triumph, signifying the inclusion of culture into the history of the creatures’ evolution.  Spore takes what was built in the previous phase and meshes it with a rudimentary Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. The strict adherence to simplicity present in previous phases is present in this iteration as well: The end goal is to establish the creature as the dominant species on the planet by via declaring war, entertaining other tribes, or a mixture of both.  The tasks are facilitated again by the creature creator, this time with the addition of wardrobe with each article of clothing giving a bonus to gathering, combat, social skills, or a combination of any two.  Ultimately, that simplicity limited the development of the phase and it again felt like a glorified tutorial as I quickly played my maracas, flutes, and digideroos to global dominance and the Civilization phase.

I’m going to assume that Spore’s fourth phase mimics Civilization, despite never having played a single Civilization game in the series.  In that regard, I very much looked forward to the new phase of the game only to find that my past game decisions as a friendly, herb-devouring, socially adept but retarded-looking antlered bird creature put my civilization on the path of religious zealotism  (Yeah… I don’t really see the connection).  The goal of the game this time was to extend the influence of my nation throughout the planet, beginning with my freshly thrown together mess of a car equipped with French horns, organ pipes, and a Zen gong exerting its religious hegemony on a nearby spice mine.  This was followed by yet another session of begrudgingly throwing together random objects in the creature creator to create buildings for my city.  Yes, I said begrudgingly – designing so many creatures, vehicles, and buildings was extremely tiring and overwhelming for me at this stage of the game and I really wanted to move on as quickly as possible.

The actual meat of the Civilization phase consisted very simply of me building as many faithmobiles as possible and rushing my neighbors in early RTS fashion.  My weapons of choice however weren’t explosives and bombs but rather words and faith delivered via a singing holographic projection of my creature.  There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief at work here as the cartoony visual of bombs vs. psalm didn’t really do it for me, but the holographic of my bird creature was a laugh-out-loud moment.  In any case, the cycle of building vehicles and taking over cities continued a few more times until I was presented with a cutscene indicating that I now had access to flight technology and was presented with another creator!  Ok, seriously now.  Despite my clear irritation, it was at this point that the game took an almost inexplicable turn into the realm of non-casual gaming: the introduction of flight into my game for whatever reason multiplied the difficulty of the game many times over and the other large empire on my planet was soon at my doorstep dropping bombs on my city with its swarm of not-so-friendly airplanes.  Ugh.

My solution to this problem was rather unorthodox:  After 3-4 failed attempts to fight the aggressors off, I opted to try establishing a trade route.  “Ok, they’re not attacking me.  Now we’re getting somewhere!”  After a set time of commerce, I was given the option of buying out the city I was trading with.  So I did.  And then I received a message from my former enemy asking for an alliance of which I gladly obliged to.  And then the phase ended.

Err..what?  Was it seriously that easy?