The problem was Beast had been de-hunked and now looks rather unimpressive. I got to play through one challenge where I was instructed to reunite a creature called Beauty with her hunky friend called Beast. Whilst the God-like control of everything might have been removed in favour of a protagonist-lead adventure, you can still alter and influence your surroundings. Various shakes and gestures allow you to perform all sorts of offensive and defensive moves combined with more traditional button pressing action. The fighting itself is pretty impressive, with a range of attacks and move available that make decent use of the Wii-mote controls. And what do nests mean? Nesting! Nests are the only places that you can access creature creator so it is crucial you unlock as many as possible to allow you to upgrade and alter yourself easily. Fighting gives you respect and respect gives you access to nests. Yup, fighting is at the very core of what Spore Hero is about. In fact, you're more likely to punch fellow beasties in the face with one of your many overly long arms. You'll have to destroy them in order to being back a world of niceness and cuddles. The red shards tend to send everything a bit 'strange' and will prove to be a hindrance in your quest. By smashing up blue bits of crystal (which are scattered all over the map) you get 'money' which you use to buy body bits that you collect. No prizes for guessing that one colour is evil and one colour is good. Two meteors crash to Earth, a red one and a blue one. The plot is a pretty simple one, but fun nonetheless. This attention to detail is key to the whole character and charm of Spore Hero. If you design something with long legs it will clatter clumsily along taking huge strides, give it little stumps and it will scuttle and fall across the landscape. ![]() What's best, though, is the creature animation itself. The colours are vibrant and vivid and the huge environments are clean, crisp and really well put together. Graphically, the game attempts to retain the cartoony charm of the franchise and it does so really impressively. I spent a good twenty minutes messing around with the creature creator alone and conceived a rather odd looking beast that had far too many limbs. This allows you to make some truly strange and wonderful creatures. This is almost a straight lift from the PC version, with all the parts from both the original Spore and its expansion, along with some more chucked in for good measure. Based on how you play the game, your creature will acquire different characteristics that you can tweak in the creature creator. ![]() You can fight, help, explore, or simply rush your way through the whole experience. The aim is to find your own path through the game and play it your way. Huge environments encourage and reward exploration, with new creature creator parts, upgrades and other odds and sods sprayed across the map. The whole package seems to be a pleasing mix of traditional platforming, creature customisation and upgrading, and a rather well-realised fighting system that could (almost) be a game in its own right.ĮA walked me through a substantial chunk of the game and I had lots of time to run around and mess about in what is seemingly a massive game. That's not to say this game lacks focus, though, far from it. You play as one creature, you control only this one creature and you play through the whole game in an adventure/fighting/creature creating mishmash. The result is a game that sticks true to the roots of Spore but goes off in a whole new direction. Speaking to the assistant producer on the title, Mathiau Cote (full interview soon) it became clear that the folks behind this game wanted to make it a story driven adventure with a distinct protagonist, keeping in line with a long tradition of 'hero' games on Nintendo platforms. Eskil has some very specific ideas about how user-generated systems are useful to a game designer.Interestingly, the game's developer has opted for a totally different direction with Spore Hero. Creation of a wondrous settlement is its beating heart, and teams of players spend hours raising these spectral towns and defending them from AI incursion. Players can raise walls, excavate tunnels, even craft elegant windows and plant trees. At its heart is the ability to warp and mould the landscape to build settlements. Three of these games are now using players to build their worlds, and their achievement puts mainstream game development to shame.Įskil Steenberg’s Love (opens in new tab)isa painterly, moderately-multiplayer game of settlement building and exploration. ![]() But one community has both embraced and mastered the concept: the world of independently developed, bedroom-coded MMOs. User-generated content has not revolutionised gaming, only thrown up a few oddities here and there. However, five years on we can see that the mainstream development community has made only the vaguest of efforts to follow in Spore’s footsteps.
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