Video Game Review

Video Game Review













Teacher: Mr. Darvasi
Name: Matthew Kruk
Date Submitted: November 9, 2009
Course Code: ENG1D
Tribe: Mohawk





Spore is a game published by Electronic Arts, also known as EA games. The game was released for the PC. Spore is a multi-genre game. It can vary from playing it in a god - like circumstance, a life simulation, real time strategy (RTS) and a role playing game. The game was released on September 7, 2008.

The story of the game is about how life was brought to a planet. The game starts when a giant chunk of ice carrying small microscopic organisms inside it crashes into the planet and releases the organisms. You start off as one of those microscopic organisms and you work your way to becoming the top of the water food chain by getting new parts and eating food. This is also known as the cell stage. You can be a carnivore, herbivore or an omnivore, which affects you later on in the game. Once you reach the top of the food chain, you grow legs and move onto the land. From here you can explore and grab new parts, to fight or make friends with other creatures. This is the creature stage. When you fight or socialize with other creatures, you gain DNA points to buy new parts. This increases your creature’s intelligence and when done often enough, you will advance to the tribal stage. In the tribal stage, you have a hut and the game twists and turns into a real time strategy game. You can have up to 12 people in your tribe. You can gather food, which is used as currency in the tribal stage. When you fight or socialize, you will unlock new parts, and new, harder tribes to be nice to or attack, will appear. Once you have annihilated or befriended all huts, you will advance to the civilization stage. Your tribal village then turns into a city. This also follows the RTS rules. In this stage you can destroy, convert or economically purchase every city. Money is gained through cities. Each city has factories, houses and entertainment facilities. Factories produce money and unhappiness, while entertainment provides happiness and houses give more money when linked with factories and more happiness when linked with entertainment. When you have conquered the world in any three manners, you may go on to the space stage. The space stage is a very large and explorative stage in which you control a space ship and fly around the galaxy. You can do many things in space stage such as interacting with aliens, terraforming planets and exploring. The main goal of space stage is to reach the center of the galaxy but you encounter many problems along the way. The rest is up to you to play and find out what happens…

I found the game very addictive because of the many things you can do. You can customize your own cell, creature, buildings, vehicles, spaceship and more, which made it fun to create different things. Playing as cool characters that you create keeps the game different and makes you want to play more.

I would change many things in this game. I would change the civilization stage because it is very easy and does not quite expand on all the problems a world would really have at that time. Since space stage is very big, there are many problems you must always be attending to such as ecodisasters, pirate attacks/raids or alien attacks if you are at war. This does not allow you to do very much else and you must always keep coming back to those planets to solve the problems. I would make the time each problem happens on one of the planets longer so that you may explore and head towards the center instead of always worrying about your planets. With these changes, the game what be almost perfect.