My first impressions mini-review:
Before I start, let me say I loved the idea of Spore from the first time I heard about it.
I preordered the Galactic Edition of the PC game and really liked that quite a lot.
There were flaws, and it didn't live up to all the hype, but itwas still pretty awesome.
The first offering of Spore on the DS however, was very disappointing. The creature creator in Spore Creatures was nothing like that of the PC game, and the gameplay was pretty dull too.
Anyway, on to this new DS Spore.
Spore Hero Arena is all about flying around from one planet to the next, landing on them, interacting with the local species', collecting new parts for the creature creator and completing challenges to collect meteor fragments which allow you to access the boss fight for that planet.
There are two main sections of the gameplay. One is roaming around the planet collecting things and talking to other creatures, and the other is fighting in the arenas.
The controls for both sections are mostly the same. The stylus is used to direct your creature, similarly to the way it is used in Zelda, and the buttons and D-Pad are used to perform actions.
The available actions are Hit, Bite, Spit, Block and Bio-Power.
Hitting knocks an opponent back and hurts them a bit, or damaged obstacles in your path.
Biting hurts an opponent more than spitting but doesn't knock them back as much.
Spitting is a long range attack.
Blocking reduces damage from attacks and prevents you from being knocked back so much.
Bio-Powers are special abilities that can be assigned to your creature in the creature creator.
Bio-Powers are only usable in the arena gameplay.
The general process of the game involves flying to a planet and landing on it, then collecting the blue metorite shards to unlock the boss battle.
The shards are generally awarded as prizes for completing challenges set by the inhabitants of the planet. These challenges can include battles with certain conditions imposed, herding small creatures, escorting and protecting creatures, running races against other creatures and so on.
These challenges don't always yeild meteorite shards, in fact most times they unlock new parts for use in the creature creator. Parts can also be found just lying around on the ground.
Fighting in the arenas contorls the same as the other part of the game, but with the inclusion of Bio-Power special abilities.
You and your opponents each have a set number of lives, and a health and Bio-Power bar.
Losing all your health doesn't seem to result in death. The only way to die appears to be by being knocked off an edge of the arena platform.
The combat feels fairly easy, and I didn't have any trouble completing all the fights available on the first planet.
Finally, and arguably the most important part of a Spore game, the Creature Creator.
The Creature Creator in this game feels like a simplified version of the one in the PC game.
The available parts all seem familiar from my experience with the PC game, and while the level of customisation and precision of placement for the parts is not as high as in the PC game, there's still a lot of room to get creative in building your creatures.
Probably the most disappointing part of the creature creator in this game for me is the inability to sculpt the body at all.
Instead you get to choose from a fairly large selection of pre-shaped bodies.
The extent of customisation for each part is the ability to change the size of the part, and to rotate it on one axis.
Interestingly, increasing the size of a part increases its cost in DNA points, but also increases the stats provided by the part. This feels like an improvement over the system used in the PC game where the parts always cost the same and gave the same stats no matter how you adjusted them.
Overall I'd say it's not a bad game. Much better than Spore Creatures for sure, but still nowhere near what Spore was on PC. It may amuse me for a while, but I don't imagine I'll be playing it much a couple of weeks from now and I probably won't remain interested enough to finish it.
When reading about this game I also heard that there is a Spore Hero game coming to the Wii, so if nothing else, this game has at least informed me of that new possibility too.
Edit: Hmm, looking back, I guess that wasn't such a mini review after all.
Xdqwerty
what are you looking at?
@
CameronCataclysm:
Why no blog posts about Nitendont going after Garry's Mod repos that have been up for a decade or 2?
