It is virtually a law in gaming that hype and protracted development rarely deliver good results. Will Wright’s Spore has proved no exception. Since he created such classics as the Sim City series and such runaway successes as The Sims, many gamers assumed that anything Will Wright created could be expected to succeed, and Wright promised unprecedented scale in this “massively single-player” work. The game, however, has proven far less innovative than had been anticipated. Were it not for the surrounding hype, Spore would simply be mediocre and boring; however, it has proved to be an incredible disappointment and, marred by Electronic Arts’ draconian-yet-ineffective copy-protection software, is solidly a flop.

Spore follows the evolution of a species, which begins as a single cell, then evolves to a land animal, forms a tribe, civilizes and finally explores space. Each of these stages has its own gameplay: Cell plays like a simplistic Diablo, Creature like a simplistic World of Warcraft, Tribal like a simplistic Starcraft, and Civilization and Galactic both like simplistic variations on Civilization. Gameplay-wise, Spore provides nothing that a gamer hasn’t experienced before, and doesn’t even offer exceptionally fun implementations of them. Gameplay within each stage is easy, shallow, repetitive and boring, with the sole saving grace that each stage is mercifully short. Losing is nearly impossible, with terrible AI opponents, no multiplayer and annoyingly plentiful resources. New games can eventually begin on any stage, but the player is initially forced to unlock stages past Cell, so that real-time strategy fans are forced to first endure hack-and-slash and role-playing games.

There is a certain richness lacking from Spore’s version of evolution. One is forced to play as a land animal: advanced marine life is not an option, arboreal life is ignored and flight is essentially jumping really far. All the habitats basically look the same, so “evolution” turns into arbitrary whim. Furthermore, creatures can be completely redesigned between each stage of evolution. If, for instance, my creature has been designed to specialize in combat and I want to ally with another species (which would require social bonuses), I can evolve it into a completely social creature, ally with the other species, and then evolve again to get my fighter back, all without any commitment to my evolutionary changes.

Spore makes some efforts to unify the stages into a cohesive game, but most hurt more than they help. The sole gameplay-relevant aspect carried from stage to stage is a good/neutral/evil scale: as early as cell stage, you determine how your species is perceived for the remainder of the game. Eat too much meat, and your species is doomed to spurn diplomacy for military conquest, because the AI will hate you for the rest of the game, thus depriving you of options in an already simplistic game. Furthermore, the game’s save system always overwrites the previous save when saving, preventing one from backtracking to the previous stage without starting an entirely new game. The terrible save system also lacks any kind of autosaving, which would be helpful, given that the game does crash from time to time.

The heart of the game, however, lies in design. As the player advances, he is given more points to design first his creature and its clothing, then its vehicles, buildings and spaceships. At best, the design is irrelevant to gameplay, but the two often conflict. If I wish to design a bird of prey, I either have to ignore the fact that the beak sacrifices attack for (mostly useless) low-level singing or make a bird with a leech’s mouth. Furthermore, the bonuses granted in gameplay have nothing to do with the placement of the respective parts: how putting a kilt on your head grants you combat level 2, I do not know.

The game is further crippled by Electronic Arts’ decision to include the same copy-protection software on Spore that earlier appeared on Mass Effect. Though it does little to impede pirates—indeed, a pirated version of Spore appeared on the Internet several days before the game’s launch—this DRM severely inconveniences paying customers, since the game may only be installed three times, total. If you get a new computer or have to reinstall your operating system more than three times, you lose the game you paid for.

Designers who can endure the gameplay could have fun designing whimsical creatures and sharing them with others through Maxis’ network (the “massively single-player” aspect of Spore), and non-gamers could possibly have fun with small, simple versions of more serious games, but Spore will bore even the casual gamer. Even designers and non-gamers will likely find it not worth the $50 price tag, and the massive unfairness of EA’s DRM will probably scare away anyone who would have paid. Spore is, therefore, not recommendable to anyone.