Spore Review

The creature creator is a real achievement and it deserves to be judged separately from the game attached to it. Maxis solved procedural animation for shapes nobody designed in advance, so a six-legged asymmetric thing you assembled in five minutes walks, dances, and emotes with correct weight, and the technology behind that is harder than most of what shipped that year. The problem is the five stages sold as a single arc.

Cell is a charming twenty minute appetiser, creature is a shallow errand loop, tribal and civilisation are strategy games with one viable strategy each, and space is enormous but quickly becomes terraforming chores interrupted by an empire that will not stop calling. Nothing you build in one stage meaningfully changes the next, which drains the entire promise of evolution out of the design. Add a launch copy protection scheme that treated buyers as suspects and you get a game remembered as a toolset people used to make something else.