A year before release, a Spore tech demo was shown. It was probably one of the most innovative and ambitious mainstream projects in the last five years. Everyone was blown away. But because their main audience (The Sims audience) did not have powerful computers, it got scaled back massively, until it became a shell of a game. Most people did not enjoy it, except for the Character creator which was one of the few things that remained mostly intact from that first demonstration.
Now DarkSpore comes out, and instead of being the ambitious mega-project that actually FULFILLS its promises, DarkSpore is the safest it could possibly be, jumping on every bandwagon going. The only thing that is still uniquely spore is the character creator. It's like the difference between the Hulk film by Ang Li, and the other Hulk film that wasn't by Ang Li. One was ambitious and tried to do loads of new and strange things, and the follow up was so cliche and average that it was almost parody.
Let me give a rundown of what DarkSpore is:
It's a fast paced Action RPG (Mass Effect) about a hero saving the galaxy from a mutated enemy called the DarkSpore (A million other games). It will be 4 player co-op (Gears of war, Halo, Borderlands, Left4Dead) in a full single player campaign. There will also be "intense multiplayer battles" (A requirement of any generic shooter.) The hero will have to gather heroes together and upgrade them with random loot, including body parts.
Now I'm not saying that such a game would be bad, but considering what spore used to be, this game might as well not be spore at all. It even has a dark and growly trailer on youtube. I'm a fan of shooters, but this all tastes of extreme safety, with no attempt to do anything interesting or daring.
But then I obviously haven't seen anything of the actual game yet. Who knows what they might do with the genre.
But then I did hate that second Hulk film.
