Preview: Darkspore

Maxis, under the able stewardship of Will Wright, have always produced innovative often slightly weird games. SimCity was a masterpiece, and in the two decades since it first appeared it has been refined and refreshed to keep it modern and interesting. The Sims was perhaps even more intriguing, and continues to find fans by being strangely addictive. Arguably Maxis and Wright’s most inventive title to date, though, is Spore. Part God-game, part strategy, part action, and even part-RPG, Spore gave players the chance to develop their own species of creature from its very beginnings as a single-cell organism in the primordial soup through to an advanced civilisation roaming the stars. The Spore Creature Editor provided with the game lets you design your species however you wanted; colour, size, number of legs, number of eyes, wings, jaws… the options are extensive. Unfortunately, despite the immense scope of the game, the elegance with which it was all strung together, and the way it gripped the imagination, Spore never really delivered. The concept was amazing, but a combination of Digital Rights Management issues that would make Steve Jobs blush, and an implicit inability to decide just what the game was supposed to be, meant that by and large the public just turned off to Wright’s big vision.

When Darkspore was announced as the first major Spore derivative (expansion packs aside), I was keen to see in just what direction the concept could be taken. As I just mentioned, Spore suffered from multiple personalities and was unable to carve a niche in any particular genre. Darkspore was touted as a “Diablo in space”, with the Spore theme being restricted to appearances and use of the Creature Editor. From my perspective, that seemed like a sensible option: expand on the theme, but wind back on the scope to allow for games with definable visions.

As the game moved into its Beta stages, more and more reports came out from players that things really were living up to the hype. Admittedly, the majority of these good news stories were those cherry-picked by Darkspore’s social networking team to be retweeted, but I was still keen to see things for myself. Luckily, the Maxis Twitter team are a jolly nice bunch of people who kindly offered me a beta key at the first time of asking. An hour or so of downloading later and I was good to go.

The game is essentially set around the idea of a race of master scientists, the Crogenitors, unlocking the secrets of genetics and creating vast armies of “living weapons”. True to form, the act of playing God came with consequences and the Crogenitors were all but wiped out, along with their creations, by the unexpected rise of a genetic “hive mind”: the Darkspore. The six that survived were placed into stasis, with five being shipped off across the galaxy with a specific surviving strain of their living weapons in order to recreate their nominated species in secret. The sixth, you, was left to wait for the right time to begin collecting together your new heroes, imbued with new powers discovered from your previous mistakes. With them, you begin your quest to rid the galaxy of the Darkspore. Not that you’d be able to tell this from the cut-scenes of inter-mission briefings, as these are generally too vague or too complicated, and always too boring to really want to listen.

Bear in mind that Darkspore is only in beta phase, so there is still plenty of scope for change before release. With that in mind, how does the gameplay measure up so far? Well, the Diablo comparisons mentioned earlier are fundamentally correct. The game plays as a top-down real-time RPG where you simply left-click to move or attack, and your five skill slots are accessed through the number keys. Beyond that, I think it’s quite insulting to a game of Diablo’s quality to be used in such examples. There really isn’t much more to Darkspore than pointing, clicking, and pressing the odd skill now and then. Your characters are based around the basic RPG classes – healers, tanks, area damage, damage over time, point damage, pets, buffers and debuffers – but there doesn’t seem to be any real structure or interdependency. A healer or tank is perfectly capable of dealing enough damage to hold their own, and health item drops are common enough that other classes can live without their assistance.

This lack of integration shows itself in quite stark contrast to the multiplayer ethos that Darkspore tries hard to sell. The entire game is played around the online infrastructure, with every player logging into an online lobby before selecting and entering a mission. While missions can be played solo, you generally find it easier and more rewarding to collaborate. With a simple button click you are entered into a pairing system that finds other players looking to finish the same level as you. A party is formed, and you are all placed on the planet, in the mission, together. At that point, the multiplayer aspect collapses as there isn’t really that much need to communicate or work together. Following your teammates around ensures that you tend to decimate any enemy that appears, but splitting up – and even wandering away on your own – rarely causes an issue. Most parties just become free-for-alls as everyone smashes their way towards the goal. Any items discovered by any party member are distributed evenly on a basic dice-roll mechanism – the more party members, the more enemies you face and the more special items you drop.

Character levelling is entirely item-based, with new and more powerful equipment dropping as you progress through the levels. You equip the items, from eye stalks to breast plates, in the Creature Editor for each of the heroes in your party, and the items add to your various stats to improve that hero’s effectiveness. At the end of a mission you have the opportunity to collect a rare, powerful item. Again, this is a one-off dice roll and random item generation event. The better you did in the mission, and the larger your party, the more likely you are to get the most powerful items. You can also opt to “gamble” your winnings from the last mission, by continuing immediately to the next. If you successfully complete the next mission your chance of obtaining a rare item is increased, but if you fail you lose everything you found in the lead-up. As you progress in the game you can upgrade your ship, enabling you to chain together more back-to-back missions, thus increasing the level of equipment you find.

On top of your character levelling, you also have an overall “Crogenitor Level”. This is based on standard RPG-type experience points. As you level up your Crogenitor, you are allowed to “discover”, or unlock, more living weapon heroes. There are 100 individual heroes in the game, split between five “races” (the species developed by each of the Crogenitors) with a combination of skills divided between them, and each with a unique profile or background story. This is where I get a little confused, because on each mission you can only take a squad of three heroes with you at a time and so having a selection of 100 to choose from seems a little excessive. I get that people want choice, but everyone gets the same 100 to pick. The Creature Editor allows for some modification of appearance, but there is no genuine ability to create a truly unique hero from scratch. To me it just seems to defeat the purpose, going against the core Spore principles. Surely it would’ve been easier to let a player develop their own heroes, with their own names and load-outs, than generate a large list of standard models that everyone has to pick from? That would give the game real scope for personal expression, and made the most of the Creature Editor.

Overall the game just seems to be bland. The interface is overly simple, and the customisation offers just enough scope to be tedious while stopping short of offering genuine individuality. Missions are boring and samey, with any “tactics” based around one simple game mechanic: if an enemy is the same species as your hero, you take double damage. Once you’ve selected your squad of three to take advantage of this, given that you know the enemies you’re coming up against in advance, you really are just pointing and clicking for twenty minutes until the big boss is dead. I guess the intention is for people to be competing for new equipment to enable them to get their favourite characters into the PVP arena, but with the limited time and the level cap on the beta I doubt this has really been seen much.

On the plus side, Darkspore runs very well on relatively low PC specs, and could be seen as a nice introduction to isometric RPGs for the younger generation or the casual gamer. However, without some serious attention to the missions and making them more engaging, or offering more diversity through the Creature Editor, I don’t think I’d be in a position to recommend this to anyone over the age of twelve. The whole thing just reeks of Electronic Arts cashing in on a franchise without the creative input from Wright, and to be frank it’s pretty boring.