It's very interesting reading the metacritic stuff for the game. The critic scores are generally high, but if you read the blurbs, a lot of them are kind of "this is awesome, but..." or "despite the flaws, this is great" or "there's this major issue here, but we don't really care". It's weird. And the user response from people who regularly play games has been generally quite bad. Not everyone dislikes it... I know a couple guys that dig it, and Julia played it a little bit and thought it was quite fun, but it all comes back to how much you love the "this is a toy" aspect of it, because the actual game part just really isn't there.
That's exactly how I've seen it during the past week, and like yourself, I have found it really odd. I actually haven't played the game yet as I am not willing to throw $50 its way, but the core gamers have been quite disappointed.
The weird thing is that from every publication/website, I noticed most of the staff being vocal about their disappointments with game either on their podcasts, or their forums, yet they weren't the ones to review the game.
The funniest thing for me was PC GAMER, which by every right should have allowed Dan Stapleton to review the game, but handed it over to Kristen Salvatore instead. Well I guess she took it since she is the EiC.
Here is the review: (they post their reviews online almost immediately now)
http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/spore/review/spore/a-20080903161719295065/g-2006022417441549006It starts with:
"
DEAR WILL WRIGHT,
May I call you Will?"
It is actually a decent review from Kristen, but the 91% score seems very undeserved to me, and the whole "I love Will" thing was nauseating.
Here is what Dan Stapleton had to say at the end of the review:
P.S.: A Note From Our RTS Guru
In the process of creating a form of real-time strategy gameplay accessible to even RTS-averse gamers like Kristen, Spore’s Civilization phase is infuriatingly simplistic to anyone who’s accessed an RTS in the past decade. There are only three units to choose from (land, air, and sea), reducing it to a near-literal game of Rock-Paper-Scissors (in fact, someone’s probably already made units that strongly resemble rocks, paper, and scissors). Standard interface features like control groups are completely absent, and balance-wise, there isn’t even a hint of how religious or industrious societies are supposed to knock down swarms of militaristic societies’ air units. And of course, the lack of multiplayer is really going to hurt replayability, especially once you figure out that even in hard mode, the AI doesn’t bother to defend its resources. This is definitely a strategy game built for people who don’t like the things that are generally considered to make strategy games interesting. -Dan Stapleton
a) Why the hell wasn't he allowed to review, when he reviewed every other RTSish title during the past two years?
b) Why was this the same at most publications, where the RTS "experts" only vented on the forums etc, and weren't allowed near the review.
I guess it could have to do with the appeal of the game, where it is less about the strategy, and more about the charm.
This to me kind of smacks of Black & White. Innovative game that's highly anticipated and is very well received critically upon release, yet a lot of users are like WTF after they play it for a bit, and later on down the road most critics don't know what the hell they were smoking when they wrote their reviews.
haha right... Black & White had a lot of fantastic extras on top, but an hour later it turned out to be just another strategy game... minus the strategy. But its reviews were crazy positive initially, and lol most of those very reviewers are extremely sheepish about it now.
