Spore Creepy and Cute Parts Pack review (PC)

Everyone reading this should have heard of a little unassuming game called Spore which was released a scant few moons ago. If not then what galaxy do you hail from my friend?

Spore was very well received for the most part and gave you the chance to start off as a minuscule speck, working your way up the food chain until you grew a brain big enough to cope with the most basic of tasks before braving the higher echelons of society. Just when you thought you were the big cheese you were shown how small you really were in the grand scheme of things, a bit like life in the work place really.

The most popular element of the game was, unsurprisingly, the Creature Creator. With a bit of imagination, wondrous flights of fancy could take shape before your very eyes. Creatures of any shape and size (within reason of course) would eventually inhabit cities designed by the player, live in houses, work in factories and go to see a show, all in buildings pulled from your psyche. It didn’t stop there either. Oh no. Space flight and exploration was also possible, expanding the game to gargantuan proportions.

Return to Endor

Given that the developer of the game is Maxis, the brains behind The Sims, it was hardly a surprise when the Spore Creepy and Cute Parts Pack (SCCPP) was announced. As the name suggests, the pack should add cute and creepy parts to the Creature Creator and can be used with either the stand alone Creator or Spore itself. It brings new parts, paint styles and animations to your handiwork, but is it any good, or more importantly in today’s economic climate, worth the penny shy of a tenner you will have to splash out to purchase it?

It all depends on what you want from Spore in general. If you love creating bizarre beings just for the hell of it, then any addition to the list of available parts with which to play God will make you as happy as Larry. Those of you hungry for more gut churning cartoon cuteness are well catered for with some adorable additions with which to propagate an army of fuzzy love.

The meanies out there, of which I am most certainly one, are not so well catered for and will have to make do with the likes of chitinous arthropod appendages (quite a mouthful I am sure you’ll agree) that are about as creepy as an army of Ewoks.

The problem lies with the overall cuteness of Spore and its rounded, child friendly edges. There is very little visual difference between the new and the old parts and the developer obviously realised this when they came to the decision of adding a button to the parts screens that help you swap and therefore differentiate between old content and new. Without that help the SCCPP would have blended seamlessly into Spore without so much as a whimper.

The added colour schemes and animations were lost on me as they will be on most people. I honestly could not tell what was different from when I last played the game, which was just a few days before. It all stinks a little of corporate greed and of using a business template (the Sims anyone?) that obviously rakes in money by the bucket load.

Allowing you to mess with the stock colour schemes and patterns would have made a huge difference to the game but would have made it more difficult to sell an add-on pack such as this. There is nothing really wrong with the SCCPP. It certainly doesn’t harm Spore to have extra content and many people will love the new stuff if they are sharp enough to spot it but it really should have been called the Spore Cute and Cuter Part Pack and done away with any pretence of appealing to our inner Goths. With that in mind I can only urge you to buy this if you are an avid fan of all things Spore or you happen to see it for at least half of the current selling price.