Considering myself both creative and godlike, I, among millions of others was excited for spore, and when the trial for the creature creator came out, I was impressed enough to take the plunge and buy the whole thing.

It started off via a paypal purchase, which with tax and a one time fee for eas “extended download service”, came to 18.02, much more than advertised. I also had to create an eastore account(par per the course for any website you buy stuff from), and download EAs proprietary client, where my purchase didn’t appear for about twelve hours. So the process of actually getting this half game is piss poor.

The game itself, at first glance is immensely underwhelming. You have limits on what you can do, there are only twenty options and not as half as much customization as what you expected. It’s a case of peter molyneaux-ism, where expectation succeeds results.

After the initial shock of my expectations not being met was worn off though, I had alot of fun with it. Theres infinite customization here, even if you cant give your creature two hundred legs. Each body part can be resized and molded to a point, the body structures and spines can all be changed and the colour palette is huge, with special texturing for each of the three layers(base, coat and detail) you can add, as well as a large colour palette.

It also animates your creature on the fly and lets you test what the creature looks like, sounds like, and have it do a variety of canned animations. I was a little disappointed with this part, because I didn’t want to see my creature do a halfassed dance, but wanted to see how it interacted with its environment. The creatures children are also similarly underwhelming as their is no difference between creature and young apart from size. Other than that, you can change what background environment the creature is in(from a grand total of FIVE environments), and make it look at you. You can also take pictures, make an avatar(they KNOW whos shelling out for this early), and record videos from the game.

Creating creatures is addictive, and it IS only the creature creator. Not the best 18.02 ever spent, but really good regardless, especially for creative types.

7/10