VideogameUK

I fondly remember the hype surrounding Spore before its release. It sounded like it was going to be the greatest sandbox god game ever. It wasn’t of course. That’s not to say it was a bad game or an unsuccessful game, it just never quite matched the build up. Unfortunately it’s the sort of game that has been remembered more for the pre-release hype than the actual content of the full game, a shame as it was a very intriguing proposition. The Spore franchise on the whole hasn’t fared much better either with the likes of Spore Creatures and Spore Hero Arena garnering mixed reviews and commercial success. So we come to the first Spore title for the Wii in the guise of Spore Hero, a basic but competent adventure game.

The simplest way of describing the nature of Spore Hero is to call it a very basic version of the action RPG. You start out as a round blob with legs to move around but that’s it. You’re quickly guided by the game through the main quirk to this title: the ability to add body parts for various scenarios. Such body parts range from the likes of legs and arms to enable you to attack enemies, fins to swim and horns to charge at your enemy. Oh and a mouth of course, that’s quite useful if you want to be able to eat anything after all! The more body parts that you want to use at any one time, the more blue crystals you must collect. These blue crystals are dotted around the game world quite frequently ensuring that it’s never too hard to equip extra parts. This is especially handy when you bear in mind that eventually there are 350 parts to collect all together when you include upgrades. As you can see already this is all very reminiscent of a very simplistic version of an RPG.

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