Spore is set to become one of the biggest games of the year on PC, so why not cash in on that by releasing a DS version of the game. Never one to turn down a dollar, EA have done just that with the release of Spore Creatures. But can it do for DS owners what it has done for PC aficionados everywhere? Not likely. Obviously the DS has it’s limitations and Spore Creatures doesn’t deliver the full fledged evolutionary experience that you will find on a PC, but you will find yourself enjoying plenty of features that have been reworked from the main game, now appearing in the DS spin-off.

The game begins with you and a friend arriving on terra firma. As you start to explore this new found land, a mysterious spaceship appears and beams your buddy away for reasons unknown to you. This becomes the overwhelming theme of your experience – visit new planets, evolve by acquiring new limbs and body parts, and also collecting spaceship pieces. As you explore your environment, you come across many other creatures. Befriending these creatures, or even attacking them will allow you to upgrade various parts of your body. New body parts = new skills, and will allow you to explore areas that were previously unexplorable. This makes the game fairly linear, when you get to a point in the game where you have exhausted all of your options and can longer go any further, it generally means there is a body part you are yet to find that will allow you to progress.

Creating and developing your character occurs through Spore’s creature creator, which is a simplified version of the creator you can use for the original game. The creatures you create are strictly 2D, but are animated like a 3D creature – very Paper Mario styles. Starting with a simple creature, you can add all sorts of limbs, tails, eyes etc. As you progress through the game, more body parts become available and can be acquired in certain ways. These body parts can be attached anywhere on your creature’s body, then rotated or enlarged / minimised at will. As you develop your character, you will quickly find how hard it can be to use the creature creator. Areas such as the eyes and mouth become a nightmare to edit as selecting the wrong item becomes a very frequent affair. While you can’t create anything you like, the creator is robust enough to make some impressive creatures.

As I mentioned earlier, the game does progress in a very linear fashion. The implications of this are you will always be needing to alter you creature in order to progress through various stages. Stumble across an environment you can’t conquer, you will need to edit your character so it can. This really stems the creativity that the creature creator affords and I wished the game provided a variety of different options allowing you to progress. In saying that, there is plenty of length to the game and enough to keep you going for several hours. If you choose to collect all the badges available in your adventures, several hours may just be an understatement!

There are a few annoying issues on top of what has already been mentioned. Controls were extremely horrible and frustrating. Combine this with the confusing and often moving point of view and you are hit with a double dose of ‘why am I playing this game?’. Fighting in game could have been implemented better in my opinion as well. Essentially you give the DS a good rub with the stylus which is not exactly rocket science, or riveting for that matter. However, you will quite often get your ass handed to you on a plate until you ‘evolve’ the right body parts to defeat him. In all honesty, I didn’t experience the feeling of evolution at all during this game, but then again maybe I am less open to this game then say a 10 year old would be.

Spore Creatures offers a portable twist to a game which will sell big this year. But don’t forget, portable doesn’t necessarily equal good and I think Spore Creatures fell considerably short of my expectations. Everything I heard and read about Spore and it’s DS spinoff were quite good, but Spore Creatures didn’t really impress.

Tags: Games

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under DS, Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.