It’s a Creature-Eat-Creature-World Out There

• Developer: Electronic Arts
• Version: 1.0.0
• Cost: $9.99
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

Back in March when the iPhone 3G and app store was announced, a little tech demo showing a version of Spore on the iPhone was the talk of the town for quite a while.  It was probably one of the most anticipated games for the iPhone for quite a while.  Flash forward to September, and Spore arrived, and as of this post I’ve been playing Spore Origins on and off for about a month now.

Does the game live up to the hype?  From a sales perspective, I’m not so sure.  It quickly disappeared off of the Top Paid Apps in about 2 weeks and haven’t seen it come back since.  In terms of my impressions, the game is beautifully created and really shows off the power of the iPhone as a gaming device.  The graphics - from the multi-layer background to the smooth animation, is visually very pleasing (although my creature is anything but ugly) and the music and sound effects blend perfectly into the gameplay.

On the game itself, the premise is very simple.  You control a little creature of your own design, that swims around and makes its way from primordial goup until it reaches deep water.  Throughout this little journey, the creature must swim through different areas and do two things: eat and avoid being eaten.  There are little colorful tadpoles which you compete with other creatures to eat, the larger of which would also be happy to eat you as well.  As you progress through the different levels, you get larger in size, and creatures that used to take a bite out of you now become part of your dinner menu.  After each level, you also get the option of “evolving” your creature - adding new features such as spikes, teeth, and armor to make you stronger, faster, or easier to capture food.
The app uses the tilt controls on the iphone as used on many games.  However, the controls don’t seem as sensitive as many of the driving games out there, which is a positive - I for one still can’t get used to the highly sensitive controls.

Overall Thoughts

Spore Origins is beautifully done - great graphics, sounds, and controls.  It really shows what a great game system the iPhone can be.  The only negative against the game is the lack of variety in the gameplay - there’s really only 2 things to do, eat and avoid being eaten.  After the 10th of so level, this starts getting repetitive and definitely reduces the replay value of the game.  Recommended if (when) the price drops.

App Score: 4.0 out of 5

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