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Spore Origins Preview
Written by Chris Buffa on Monday, August 18, 2008
Dominate the food chain in Spore Origins, a game where survival hinges on skillful maneuvering and adding lots of eyeballs.
In case you haven't heard, Spore is a big deal. Electronic Arts' highly anticipated evolution game is years in the making, and rabid PC and Mac fans are ready for its September 7 release. However, those aren't the only platforms featuring Sims creator Will Wright's baby. It'll also appear on iPhone as the enjoyable Spore Origins, a spin-off that doesn't have as many features as its big brother, but has the potential to be a killer app.
Spore is a mammoth video game that challenges you to create a monster from the ground up an then take it through various evolutionary stages, rising from the primordial soup, creating a civilization and then blasting off into space. Spore Origins is by no means that complex. In fact, you never leave the soup. Your job is to swim through 35 levels gobbling smaller creatures while avoiding ones bigger than you. Of course, the ultimate goal is to continue growing so that the monsters that hunt you become the hunted.
To do this, you'll tilt the iPhone to move just like in Super Monkey Ball. To swim up, for example, you'll tilt the phone away from you. You can also move down, left, right and shimmy around by performing those motions. Run into something smaller and you instantly devour it. Bump into something larger and you'll probably get attacked. You only have five lives, so avoiding enemies is key to survival.
Creatures come in all shapes and sizes and feature various attacks. One, for instance, unleashes sharp spikes whenever we touch it. Thankfully, there are ways to fight back, beginning with symbiotic relationships. There are various and tiny animals in the environment that'll latch onto and help you out with a speed boost, protective shield or poison.
You can also beef up your monster's abilities using the creature creator. There are numerous parts for you to choose, and you have the option of customizing your creation however you see fit, adding multiple eyes, horns, antennae and numerous other things. To do this, you simply drag parts from the left side of the screen and drop them onto your creature. You can even pinch and expand it as you would a photograph.
Our time with Spore Origins was limited, but from what we've seen, it's a fun game that'll let you get your Spore fix away from your computer. Swimming in goop, eating prey while evolving into a multi-horned beast sounds cool, and we can't wait to dominate the food chain when it arrives this September.
