Having chosen a team and decked out the individuals to the best of their fiddly-tentacle potential, you can launch a mission into jungle worlds and bi-luminescent caves. They're not randomly generated, as Diablo-alikes have so often been, and there are a fair few of them. The universe that requires saving consists in a series of linear levels that are, for the most part, fairly pretty places to visit and make a fight in. Against all the odds of its ugly and complicated birth, Darkspore was probably going to be okay. That sounds like a videogame to me! And, for the first hour or two I maintained a bright-eyed optimism. Then, with battle-legs adjusted and carapaces dyed shocking pink, you're off to save the universe. The higher the levels of the parts of your monsters, the better equipped they will be to harm Darkspore when you head into the wider world. As these heroic monsters are adorned with spikes, extra eyes, and techno-axes, they level up. Then there's the editor, which is a version of the lovely Spore monster editor, only with added to “loot” to be attached to your “heroes”. There are three screens to look at on board the spaceship, including one of your team, which is framed by a menu of monsters you can choose to have come with you for space-biff. You are aboard a space-ship (which sadly looks a bit like the default “Hey, This Could Be A Spaceship” type demos you might get for a new CAD program or something) and that's where you find the editing and planning aspect of the game. Before the hitting, however, there is the planning. It's an offbeat sci-fi blather that manages to make a reasonable excuse for the hitting of swarms of monsters that you are about to do. The story is badly told, but not damnable so. They retain Spore's cuteness, while also managing to look vaguely like X-Men in fancy dress and/or a range of Transformers toys based on crustaceans. So far, so xenomongous.Īnd I suppose the creatures are actually rather charming, for the most part. Your kind – the Crogenitor - has previously been dramatically defeated by the Darkspore (a story explained via undramatic robotic voice and fantasy art montage) and now they are back for their revenge turn. The thing was born without that vital spark that made it really live.ĭarkspore works like this: you are a “Crogenitor”, an alien genetics wizard, who has conjured up a number of “genetic heroes” - aka monsters from Spore on with with lots of weapons, powers, and RPG-style levels – to fight the Darkspore, which are various alien fauna gone bad. It's a game that's reaching for something, something that isn't there. What I mean is that Darkspore feels like it was meant to be a game in the spirit of one of those brave offshoot experiments that were so much more common in the home computer eras of Spectrum and Amiga. Moreover, its meat tastes a bit like an earlier era, when familiar systems (in this case action RPG whacking of stuff for loot) were more readily mixed with something a bit unusual (a character editor derived from that of Will Wright's grand sim-everything life-sim, Spore). This is one of those games where two ideas were forced to mate and the resulting offspring came out with one eye bigger than the other.

Having carefully poured my tea, leaned back in my luxurious recliner/desk chair, and raised my gaze to the ceiling to think about the best way of phrasing this, I can state that it's, well, just a bit odd.

an action RPG? A bold genetic strangeness, then - but is it a virile cross-breed or an inbred abomination? Let me take some time you tell you wot I think.

A strange beast shambles this way: Darkspore! 'Tis the progeny of Maxis, sim-creators, and it is.

Dark spore gameplay