Right
So I bought spore two days ago, and I've been playing it avidly.
I've reached early civilization-mode and I'm a bit disappointed.
It's incredibly hard for me to do a creature that I want to do. I've got to carefully balance interaction with other species' less I plummet into carnivore; I'm trying to be an omnivore as my theme is a race of bird-people. The creature I created with the editor is my goal but... at the moment... It's (near) impossible to make it.
Why?
Because of several reasons:
Bonuses do not stack, so it's pointless designing your creature with things you like unless those are the (much more expensive) later stages. I wanted a parrot mouth for my race, but ended up playing through most of the creature stage with a vulture-like beak. Not fun.
Second, everything's expensive. I need to use a lot of feathers for my creature to look good, otherwise it's just freaky. Now apparantly I've got to put nearly all my "genetic cash" into feathers to even make him look decent! I had to skim and save and try to go with what works, but in the end it turned into a horrible mockery of what I had originally made.
Third, you can apparantly use pre-created creatures from tribal-stage and up. HOWEVER, the wings on my creature got f***ed up somehow and turned in on themselves (if anyone's tried to create a creature with wings, they know how b****y they are in aligning the way you want them) and once you hit tribal, you can NOT go back and edit the creatures biological design.
As the astute reader has noticed, I am aware of the fact that you can import creatures later on. Creatures that break the amount of genetic cash you can spend. I still think it's unforgivable that even once you've finished the creature-stage, you still can't go crazy with details on your creature! D:
Then we've got the whole herbi-omni-carni levels that you've got to watch like a hawk. Again, you can later start any stage however you want ('though you won't of course be getting your 'awesome racial bonuses' you get from starting at cellular), but it still irks me that because I protected myself pre-emptively against some predators, I'm all of a sudden a carnivore instead of a omnivore, and it takes FOREVER to get back up there.
And then there's the fact that you really can't see where on the charter you are once you've gone to the end of a stage without progressing to the next; which ultimately led to a series of saves, check-ups and restarts from me because I wasn't sure whether I'd gone back into omnivore before tribal started.
And speaking of tribal. Apparantly the murder and pillaging of a fellow tribe doesn't really lower your scores here... I had accidently found myself climbing into the green bar (or 'Good') which was to me unacceptable, my race was going to be industrial. So I set out to arm all my villagers with spears, axes and what nots and went to raid a tribe that had, since the very beginning, been trying to pillage me.
I slaughtered them all, set fire to their cottages and danced with glee...
Alas, this didn't lower me one iota on the charter and I find myself becoming religious in Civilization mode!
*facepalm*
This is a whole lot of whining about this game, but I paid for it, and I'm seeing a lot of bothersome things that shouldn't've been overlooked when the game was being designed. They had a long time to go through this, and they've scrapped a lot of what was being promised way back. The tribal mode is extremely limited in what you can equip your villagers with, and the Civilization mode I've only just touched upon, yet it seems at least a little more management-aligned.
To be honest, I had the most fun in the Bacterial stage... and that's saying a lot. Constantly running from the bigger fish while eating the smaller ones was pretty fun.
That's about all I have to rant about now. Everything else aside, my only REALLY BIG ache about this game is what I mentioned, that cheaper stuff don't add up in creature-mode and that you have to pay for every single piece, even if you buy it multiple times. Either one of those would've worked, but now I feel like I finally got my child-sized excavator only to discover that the sandbox is full of catshit...
Okay, a bit harsh, but you get my point. I've been looking forward to this ever since I saw the very first gameplay video. A lot of the stuff promised has been cut, obviously, but I can live with that. I just feel that the game is in some areas WAY too simple yet restrictive. I apologize for the whining, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who don't share my opinion, I just wanted to get this off my chest.
Oh, and I edited some parts 'cause I was angrier when I wrote this than I am now.