GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

If you didn't have to go through the hell of getting a non stop wave of "One of your colonies is under attack/Under threat of a biodisaster!", usually several at a time, I hate you and your good luck. Those things made the Space phase almost intolerable until you get the Badges to buy the stuff to prevent those things.

Cell Phase
Probably the best of the bunch, which is pretty sad. Its important in how you design your creature, for example spikes in the right place can help fend off enemy cells. What and where you place stuff, except eyes, affects how you play which is pretty neat. It also means you need to pay attention to how the other cells are designed too so you stay away from their defences if you want to kill them.

There's a few bad design decisions though. You start with about half the parts available and to get the rest you need to unlock them by killing cells or finding them in meteorite peices floating around. Problem is the rate they show up at means that you probably won't unlock them all (from my experiences, 3 Cell playthroughs and out of the six peices I unlocked 4, 2, and 3 from each play through. No unlocked content does not carry through to other games). One you get out of the tutorial but that's it. The Cell phase ends in 20-30 minutes and once you reach the end there's nothing to do except try to hunt down missing parts since you can't collect DNA points anymore and can't keep adding to your cell.

I think the Cell phase was actually too short. I wouldn't have minded staying there a bit longer making the DOOM CELL.


Creature Phase
Remember how you made your cell? That affects that you have available in the Creature phase. Had a Herbivore mouth? Well you only got Herbivore mouths! Same for Carnivore and Omnivore mouths (which in Cell phase needs to be unlocked) and you had to end the Cell Phase with the appropriate diet (so if you have a Herbivore and Carnivore mouth but only eat greens you'd get Herbivore mouths). Same for eyes; There were three eyes in Cell phase and what one you ended with affects what eye trees you have available. Ended Cell phase with the button eyes? Then you got Eye Tree #3, 6, and 9 (random numbers). You could get the "evolutions" of each eye tree but getting a different branch requires luck when finding new parts. A lot of luck. Same deal with weapons: Not having the right weapons in Cell phase means types of weapons start off locked and I never unlocked them during a playthrough of Creature phase. If you have a plan of what you want your creature to look like or do you'd better pick the right parts in Cell phase. I can see that its a "cause and effect" system but prohibiting the player for locking themselves out of something without knowing is a kick in the balls.

Another annoying restriction on making your creature is unlocking parts again. You find them at a much quicker pace than the Cell phase but there's a lot more to unlock. It isn't as bad as the complete blocking using the wrong parts in the Cell phase causes as you can find the starting part of each part tree without too much trouble (except for mouths, eyes, and weapons) and the game favours giving you improved parts of what is on your creature. However because of this I ended up with an excess in DNA points when trying to create my creature since I couldn't add the parts I wanted because I simply hadn't found them yet.

One key difference between Spore and the Creature Creator (CC) from a few months back is that abilities given by parts no longer stack. A quadruped with four legs, each set with a pair of feet that give 2 speed per pair, and a 1 speed fin only gives you 2 speed in Spore while it would've given you five in the CC. You can't compensate for not having the one good part with a bunch of decent parts and I don't know why they changed it.

The actual phase plays out with you visiting the nests of other species and either trying to charm them or kill them to finish quests (although there's only two different quests: "Charm/Kill X number of creatures of a species for DNA points" or "Go to new nest"). It feels vaguely like WoW, and combat is similar but its more like the City of Heroes/Villians game. Overal it isn't bad, although it'd be nice if the ecosystem wasn't so nest-centric. You rarely see any creatures out of their nests doing their own hunting. There's rogue creatures which don't have nests but they're rare and much stronger than anything else (except epic creatures) but they really don't make the planet feel alive. Everything's there waiting for you to find them and charm/exterminate them.

Packs are nice and they make the creature phase easy once you get them. Especially if you can recruit one of those rogue creatures. Larger pack sizes come with the getting the DNA points to make the brain bigger which also increases the creature's health. Too bad the health bonus parts don't scale with sentience though. A 5 health part will always give you 10 HP.

Here you can start seeing what your system looks like. Looking up and seeing various planets that you'll get to check out in the Space phase is pretty neat.


I'm going to leave it there for now. The more I write the more I get off track.