I am enjoying this a lot..its addictive. If not for Rift (my drug of choice) Id be playing this constantly. this gives you an idea of the amount of variation available.. co-op trailer long 36 min vid
It makes me so sad that they're putting Will Wright's brilliant simulation software to the dumbest possible use. Rather than expanding on a cool galactic simulator they decided to make a "Gauntlet" clone. That's EA for you, I guess I'm sure people will still like it and I'm not knocking the game, I just wish they'd done something a little more creative, I guess.
I hope so! I liked Spore I'd love to see a more realistic, less forgiving evolution simulator and a more realistic, less sci-fi, more SimCity-like galactic empire simulator built into one... My biggest complaint with Spore was that it was sooooo unrealistic and it also lacked a good simulation aspect like SimCity had. By the end of the game you were just micro-managing a ton of crap until you built up enough energy packs to get past the Grox to get to the center of the galaxy...and then after you got the rod of life the whole thing got into an endless pointless cycle of micromanagement. The spaceships were all the same and had no variety in performance no matter how you designed them, and you're stuck with only one ship to manage a whole empire! You'd think you could at least buy some patrol or trader ships for the AI to run... It had tons of potential though! I would have loved to have seen them work in an evolution algorithm that built your creature depending on your environment and the way you played, rather than looting parts from bones. The tribe stage was the dumbest of them all though, and played like an awful version of Age of Empires with no real unit variety and horribly stripped down diplomacy. The city stage was good, but it was so truncated it only left three options for world unity, and it didn't do them nearly as well as the Civilization series. Space was okay at first, but it gets pointless after awhile, as I said before. Some competitive multiplayer would have been a HUUUGE plus too. It also didn't let you stop and just leave the game on one stage to play it as a sim. It kind of forced you to advance to survive and didn't do much simulating at all, and once you got to the final stage...yeah I talked about that already, not much simulating there.
Don't even get me started on the space age in spore. The fact that 1) you only had one ship and 2) your ship couldn't even attack in space (but you damn sure could get attacked) was extremely annoying. spore was a momentous game, but it had its flaws, just like all others.