The review is up at Gameshark. It’s short, and a little low on original insight, mostly because so much has already been said. I do make a reference to a Broadway composer that most of my audience has no interest in, which I suppose makes me a swishier Kieron Gillen.

The review may seem to be heavy on the negatives for a B+, but I don’t use the word “joy” lightly. And I do think that Spore is on to something big regarding user interaction and tapping the imagination of average users.

Below is a video of the Schwartz song I reference. It’s from his off Broadway show, Children of Eden – a very sappy retelling of the Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel and Noah stories from Genesis. It’s not his best show, but it has a couple of really nice tunes and it has become quite popular with amateur theater productions. It doesn’t have the power of Pippin or the belting of Wicked or the melodies of Godspell. But Spark of Creation (sung by Eve after she eats the Forbidden Fruit and has her eyes opened to the possibilities of humanity) is a beautiful song. (In fact, the show is at its best when it takes the side of Mankind against God; Lost in the Wilderness is one of the great anthems of defiance in musical theater.)

Here’s Natalie Weiss:

I am the echo of the eternal
cry of “Let There Be!”

This is where Spore gets me. It is world building on the cheap – and they aren’t even complete worlds. If you’ve ever tried to drop an alien species on to your home planet, you know that the food chain fills up fast, and you’ll often get a message that there is no room for your creature; something else has filled that niche.

But this is a game where you take a look at your options and try things out. You can go for aesthetics or functionality or just plain weirdness. And when you see your muppets dance to a happy pipe tune, conducted by Bandmaster Chief Z, you have to smile. I remember when I first saw a flying creature take off after I tried to eat it. I remember leading my pack into an assault on a much stronger creature, stunning it with a roar and then tearing into the Alpha creature before the herd could recover. I remember stumbling into a friend’s spaceship and getting blown to bits – when you know the guy who made the enemy, it means something.

The Civ phase is my least favorite, I think. It is more a waiting game than any of the other phases. You wait until you get a new power. You wait until your powers charge up. There are super powers that can instantly win the game once you get a stranglehold on the continent to prevent that last-stand annoyance of one or two independent cities holding out and prolonging the pain. Even as a casual empire building game, it’s not very interesting.

So should you buy it? If you are interested in design, absolutely. I think The Sims is a deeper and better game, but if you don’t like The Sims that’s no guarantee that you won’t find something to like in Spore. It’s different; unlike any other game on the market, derivative of a dozen other games you’ve played, and hopefully the ancestor of a dozen similar games for the future.

There is a risk in that, of course. None of the Sims clones have been any good, usually because they miss the core idea of The Sims, that the mundane can be fun if you put enough carrots out there. I don’t think there will be any Spore clones, but it’s not too hard to imagine a Spore-like wargame where you design armies or ships or mechs and engage enemies created by friends and acquaintances. Or an infinite Gal Civ type game with races customized by the Internet.

This is Spore’s promise. Don’t blow it, EA.