TOM FRANCIS
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Field Studies 5: My Spore Review

After some dillying, my Spore review for PC Gamer UK went up today. I went at it with more or less the opposite mindset to most of the reviewers I’ve read. Not:

“Okay, this is supposed to be a big deal, but does it really provide a long-term challenge as a serious game?”

But:

“Ooh, what’s this?”

I didn’t give it a special license to not be a game, in fact I’m pretty hard on the ways in which it fails as one, but I bore with it as much as any other game that isn’t trying to scratch the normal itches. It seems mad to me to compare it to Civ, Diablo, Warcraft or any other Platonic form of the genres it borrows, because it’s so obviously not about those mechanics. The point of comparison, if you really had to make one, would be Second Life. And it fares rather well.

We have a little piece of page furniture in PC Gamer reviews that is widely resented among the writers, and often a pain to do: the Thumbnail Review. I thought Spore would be a particularly daunting one to summarise in a few words, but it turned out to fit easily:

“Simplified and misbalanced, but a jaw-dropping safari through the human imagination.”

I knew some mags and sites would damn it with the mild praise of a score in the seventies – in fact I thought more would than have. But to me, anything under ninety percent seems criminal and absurd. How could you possibly suggest this experience is optional, or merely decent? It is unprecedented, wild, hilarious and compulsory.

A lot of people have the game now, so footage is cheap. But here are a couple of things not many people are likely to have yet:

More Spore