Social Game Reviews

Spore Islands is the stand-alone Facebook cousin of Will Wright’s 2008 game franchise, Spore. Your role in Spore Islands is to create creatures aptly named Spores and unleash them on your own island or the islands of Facebook friends’. After deploying your Spore, you can run “observations” and watch your Spore in action competing with other Spores for resources. At the end of each observation, the winning Spore is granted an experience bonus. If this brief synopsis of Spore Islands sounds very mechanical, it is because Spore Islands is more of a simulation than it is a game. This level of simulation may be appealing to the thick-glass-wearing-number-crunching-math-geniuses amongst us but may not be enough to entice the typical Facebook gamer.

Spore-Evolution

At the start of Spore Islands, you put your creationism skills to good use by spending attribute points in the following categories: Metabolism, Senses, Strength and Life. Some of these don’t make sense right away but once you explore them a little, you will get the hang of it. Each attribute category consists of 3 sub-categories and your distribution of attribute points (12 for each major category) will determine the abilities that your Spore possesses. For example, a Spore whose Reaction (Metabolism) is high would have a greater chance of evading carnivorous spores who inhabit the island the observation is taking place on. As your Spore progresses through subsequent Observations (the crux of the simulation), you can tweak your Spore’s stats to account for the type of terrain, foliage and competing that exist on the island.

Adjusting your Spore’s stats is the only way to successfully gain maximum experience from an observation. If any lesson learnt in Sun Tzu’s Art of War is to be applied here, it is to know your enemy and know your terrain. If you master both and adjust your stat points accordingly, you’ll definitely achieve maximum experience points from each observation. Changing your stats will cost you 1 DNA point per change, so the evolution of your Spore during observations is more gradual than it is instantaneous. This is the all important hook they need to get you to come back to this game: you earn DNA points by coming back to the game regularly and you only have a finite number of points to play with at any point in time.

In addition to a Spore’s base attributes, you can update your Spore’s ability slots (3 in total) with any of the 12 un-lockable abilities in the game. As your experience increases, you earn keys that you can use to unlock abilities including the ability to spawn 2 eggs instead of 1 egg during reproduction and the ability to instantly kill a Spore during a confrontation. Adding and/or changing these abilities to your spore costs 3 DNA points.

Lastly, you can personalize your Spore with hats and different animations that cost varying amounts of DNA. These visual tweaks may add some vanity to your Spore but add nothing to the gameplay experience.

Observation makes for good science (but I’m glad I’m not in science class)

On each island that your creatures inhabit, you can run an “observation” and let loose the creature to explore the island in 150 turns (that are played out in real time). During an observation, your Spores will encounter other spore and compete for resources (vegetation, carcasses of dead spores that die of starvation or lose in battle and “sparks” that add experience points during your observation). At the end of your observation, the spores are ranked and the spore with the most experience is given 1000 bonus experience points. During an observation, you can assess your Spore’s weaknesses and strengths and how well it fairs on the given island’s terrain. A friendly status box at the end of each observation tells you how your spore performed including some tips on how to further tweak your spore for better survival in that terrain.

You are then free to change your Spore’s attributes to compensate for any weaknesses that you’ve seen (provided you have the DNA to do so). This “observation and adjusting” make up the core of Spore Island’s game-play. This simulation experience is not the gameplay experience that Facebook users are heading towards. As of this writing, only 2 of my 394 Facebook friends have tried to play Spore Islands. This number is very underwhelming and so is the overall usage of Spore Islands: out of Facebook’s 35 million active users, only 54,000 play Spore Islands.

Another feature that this game adds to its sociability factor is that it allows you to send your Spores to a friend’s island and every time you or your friend visit that island and run an observation you have the chance to gain some experience points and of course bragging rights if you do happen to win in that iteration.

Evolution (of the game)

Electronic Arts has spent some time adding features to Spore Islands since it’s release. Updates to the game include

• Being able to trade 10 DNA for 1 observation point
• Easily viewable Spore stats
• The ability for Spores to level up (allowing you to upgrade any attribute by 1 point per level)
• First creature can now move to another island
• Kicking a Spore off your island no longer costs DNA
• More accessories for purchase (yey, more hats!)

Some of these updates offer the game more replay potential (leveling up) and others add aesthetic benefits (yey…more hats?) Time will tell if these updates will keep active players interested.

Is the party over?

For those of you who loved Spore and are expecting a creationist gaming experience may be disappointed by Spore Islands. Once you’ve created your Spore, you only have control of it (her or him!) outside of the game’s Observation phases. To many, this takes the real fun out of the game. For those of you who are mesmerized by John Conway’s Game of Life simulation or enjoy tweaking statistics more than actually playing, Spore Islands may just be the vacation resort for you.

Related Links

Spore Islands on Facebook