SPORE™

Wow, what a brilliant concept. A game where you choose how you evolve from the earliest stages of life to a space farer probably would've had me obsessed as a kid, and I really regret having never played it while I was younger. You basically get to make your own vaguely dinosaur-like creature, so that would've been good enough for me. The problem is that I'm a loser adult that hates fun now, and unfortunately Spore's execution did not bring its winning idea to life for me. Don't get me wrong, the level of customisation is more than satisfactory and there's definitely some charm to growing out and interacting with different species, but a lot of what this game offers in terms of gameplay just feels underwhelming even if it isn't necessarily bad. I could feel this the most during the creature stage, where you're given the most individual control of all stages and yet the only thing to do is to walk around and decide whether you want to eradicate the species you run into or not. Combat largely boils down to spamming buttons with varying cooldowns and watching health values drop, with clunky AI and pathfinding, and social rituals are action-matching contests that are almost purely decided by stat numbers. It might improve as you go through the stages, and admittedly I did find the tribal stage to be the most immediately intriguing due to some actual management and strategy features, but it still wasn't that fun and with the help of another issue that I'll get to, I never saw it through. Maybe it'd be presumptuous to say that it feels as though they didn't have enough funding when making the game, this could very well have been their vision and that it's meant to be palatable to children, but I also can't lie and pretend that I don't think the developers wanted to do more when initially conceptualising something like Spore, nor does the lack of interesting mechanics being intentional make it any easier to enjoy interacting with. There are also some major crashing problems that can reset hours of progress due to a lack of any autosave. Of course, if you save at the wrong time, that can completely corrupt your save file too. This was what ultimately caused me to stop at the tribal stage, because while I wouldn't have protested seeing what the rest of the game has to offer, I have no interest in getting 6 hours of my progress back on a game I wasn't even enjoying much. I can respect Spore enough to have maybe recommended it regardless, but with the crashing issues I cannot justify that.