Apparently the official online embargo starts lifting tomorrow, but a bunch of print scores have already found their way into the realms of webby-land. Most notably, CVG have just posted a slightly bizarre summary of Tom Francis’ print review in PC Gamer UK, which is possibly a cheeky attempt to get a march on tomorrow’s online reviews. The lad scored Will Wright’s new’un a whopping 91%, but delivered a few sharp punches to Spore’s ribs. For the whole review you’ll need to read the mag, but what are, purportedly, the most pertinent comments can be found here.
On the other side of the coin, VG247 is reporting less favourable scores from a couple of German gaming mags.: 79% from Gamestar, and 73% from PC Games. Hmm. Looks like it’s silly season for huge score discrepancies, eh?
Update – Looks like those German mags are in the minority. There are ten reviews in the wild now, most of which are 8s and 9s. This one seems especially trustworthy, for some mysterious reason.
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Yeah, I agree with you, Myros. I have trouble to see where the 9s are coming from. The creature editor (the others less so, at least for me) is awesome but is more or less irrelevant in the best part of the game – and even that best part (the Space stage, obviously) is slightly tedious so far, and absolutely no match for similar games in that genre.
Cell stage: Holy sh*t look at the size of that, I’d better make sure I put all the parts in the right places. 9/10
Creature stage: Wow, how does that even eat? I’d better get looking for better parts for my creature, doesn’t really matter where I stuff them. 7/10
Tribal stage: So, I need hats, masks, armour and bags. And then off we go, to kill/convert our neighbors. Ooh, a music mini minigame! 6/10
Civilization stage: Cool, we get cars! Oh, I have to build a town now? And a factory. And an entertainment center. Ooh, boats. I wonder what my creatures looked like. Oh look, there’s a giant one converting all of my cities by firing music at them. 4/10
Space: HOLY SH*T, it’s HUGE! Oh what, I have to do what for you now? I thought I got to play with tractor beams and just torment all life in the universe foreve- COLONY UNDER ATTACK! Score pending, but 9/10 for letting me have a space Trireme.
It’s great, and it’s not. I doesn’t have enough focus on your creature and how it works for me, and I’d have loved all of the early stages to have been twice as long and just a little deeper.
I prefer the idea of spore to the execution. Its a very shallow simulation (at least in the first four stages) and just not loveable enough to make up for it. I alos keep getting suprised by the rapidity of the pacing. There isn’t much depth there and it seems like the game wants to make sure you don’t notice by hurrying everything along at a breakneck pace, even at the expense of tutorials explaining how everything works ( I just had to guess what my special abilities did).
When the editors do come they come all at once in a rush ( I have to design four types of buildings and three types of vehicles before I can play? Too much!). I enjoyed building the first one but by the third building I was just hurrying to get through it ( Box, door, obligatory spikes and we’re done). So far its just not been compulsive or that engaging, I’m finding it hard to care about my creature or civilization despite the editors. Somehow Spore gives me less of a sense of ownership over my species than a game whch has been doing almost the same trick for years; Civilization.
9/10 for the ideas behind the game (procedural, epic scope)
6/10 for the execution (in the first four stages)
Anyone else think the first stage was the best of the first four?