Spore Creatures review

Andrew Williams

We review Spore Creatures, a game that tries to fit the theory of evolution into your phone

Published on Nov 4, 2009

It’s pretty hard to get any large amount of people to agree about something, but a whole lot of people will find it pretty easy to agree that creationist theory is a load of old twaddle – and that includes the majority of Christian types too.

Let’s face it, the Earth isn’t only a couple of thousand years old, and it really wasn’t built in a week. If Spore Creatures had a point to make, it would be precisely this. Just like its PC counterpart, Spore Creatures sees you controlling a creature as it develops from a simple organism to a complex, multi-limbed creature.

In spite of being an evolution simulator of sorts, Spore Creatures is more focused on fun than science.

It’s comprised of just over a dozen different areas, some lush and green, others based around icy plains and sandy deserts. These areas are populated by large creatures you can interact with and tiny ones you can gobble up.

Doing so earns you experience points. Earn enough and you’ll get shunted up the evolutionary ladder a notch. In each area, there’s a nest spot too that lets you customise your creature with extra body parts that’ll alter its attack, defence and speed attributes.

There’s not much of a sense of seriousness to this though – you can pretty much mix and match as if you were playing around with a Mr. Potato Head toy. Once you get around half way through the game, after perhaps an hour, you do start to feel that Spore Creatures might have a bit too much levity for its own good.

Aside from the upgrades you get from each leap up the evolutionary ladder, which let you move into new areas of the game world, it does start to feel like picking different body parts doesn’t have all that much of an effect.

Throughout the game, you’re generally doing much the same thing – running around trying to avoid obstacles that’ll hurt you while munching away at anything that looks small enough. Doing this is admittedly quite fun, but the further you get into the game, the more it reveals itself to be shallower than it appears at first.

Still, Spore Creatures remains fun even if the evolution of your character isn’t quite as dramatic as you might hope for.