I grew up playing some of the old Spore games on my PC and loved the idea of essentially creating and managing bizarre species of space creatures.  Now Electronic Arts and Maxis have brought Spore to the Wii in their latest release, Spore Hero.  It’s a really fun, colorful, and entertaining game with a story that’s interesting and characters that keep you laughing throughout the adventure.  Here’s the basic story behind Spore Hero: You are an alien space creature that has been hurled through space on a blue meteor that crash lands on a foreign planet.  The inhabitants of the planet you land on don’t seem quite right at first glance.  That’s because “evil” creatures followed you to this planet on red meteors and are quickly spreading chaos around the world using the power of their red meteor crystals to turn the locals into babbling “idiots”.  So, it’s your job to battle the evil creatures and save your new home from evil.

When you first arrive on your new home planet, you are basically a blob with a set of eyes and short stubby legs.  By exploring your new world, you collect body parts that allow you to “evolve” yourself and form some very silly looking creature creations to use in the game.  You can also collect other “collectibles” and body parts by fighting the evil red meteor creatures.  These body parts give your character new strengths and abilities that you’ll need to solve challenges and puzzles as you explore the planet like flying or jumping really high.  Here’s a brief trailer for the game from EA that shows off some of the gameplay as well as the quality of the graphics:

What We Liked

Creatures just wanna have fun! We really loved the very light and playful presentation of Spore Hero.  Not only are the graphics colorful and cartoonish, but the creatures are so funny and animated so well that you’ll be smiling most of the time you’re playing.  Picture a world populated with less-annoying, more loveable versions of Jar Jar Binks and you’ve got it.  Spore Hero is definitely geared toward the younger crowd and our kids definitely enjoyed the playfulness and silliness that permeated the game.

Wide open spaces. The exploration part of Spore Hero offers great worlds to move through and lots of room to roam around and discover.  There are plenty of diverse environments to explore and they’re all rendered in beautiful graphics (especially for a Wii game).

Be creative. The whole idea of creating your creature is so much fun and has been a core element of all of the Spore games to date.  This creativity not only stretches your kiddos mind, but also extends the game quite a bit.  You can change your creature with over 250 parts, warp the shape of your creature and its body parts, and color your creature in such a myriad of patterns that the combinations are almost limitless.  This part of Spore Hero was possibly the most fun and our kids loved stretching their creatures and trying out all of the different ways they could change them.  It’s was lots of silly time for sure that also offered lots of creativity too.

Sporepedia. If you really want to have fun with your creature creations, Sporepedia is the place to hang out in Spore Hero.  You can create creatures to your hearts’ content and then save all of your whacky creatures in a Sporepedia so your kids can come back later and show them to their friends and family or use them to fight with in the game.

Extended play. There’s lots to explore and see in Spore Hero and it’ll take your kids a while to see and do everything.  And with the ability to create nearly limitless types of creatures, play is extended even more.  Plus, within the exploration and fighting, you may need to fight some enemies several times to collect everything from them that they have to offer.

What’s your point of view? Spore Hero features some really nice point-of-view options during gameplay that make things easier and more interesting.  Most of the time, you’re operating your character from a third person point of view.  But, you can simply press a button and see the world through your character’s eyes (which really helps with understanding the world around you better).

What We Didn’t Like

There wasn’t much we didn’t like about Spore Hero.  It’s a solid title with a good story and entertaining characters.  The only thing we did notice was that sometimes the game just seemed to slow down, especially during the fight scenes.  At first, it seemed like our controllers weren’t really responding during fights, but then I realized that they were, just a lot slower than normal.  This made it kind of tough to “enjoy” the fight sequences.  We also noticed some technical difficulties with some of the graphics when scenes got a little too close in (like your character missing body parts, or certain things becoming blocky or transparent”.  We also wish there would have been some kind of multi-player or two-player mode as it would have made it fun for the whole family to play together.

Good for the Kiddos?

Spore Hero is rated E10+ for Everyone 10 and up with Crude Humor and Mild Cartoon Violence.  The ESRB issued this rating because

“…players can battle hostile creatures in one-on-one, arena-based combat. The combat usually involves kicking another creature until its health meter reaches empty. Other attacks include biting, using needles and spikes, spitting, charging, and employing a “Combo Strike.” During the course of the game, players can feed their creatures all types of food; if players give them the wrong type of food, their creatures can vomit a green spew on the ground.”

Although there is fighting in the game, it is not the central theme of Spore Hero.  Most of the gameplay centers around exploration and creature creation.  When you do need to fight an “evil” creature, the level of violence is actually fairly low for a “fighting game” and there is no graphic violence at all.  There is no blood or goriness and when a creature loses a fight, it simply falls down.

There is some educational value to Spore Hero.  First and foremost is reading and reading comprehension.  Although the characters in Spore Hero do speak, it’s not a language that you’d recognize.  The silly language is actually quite funny sounding, but it also means that every character interaction in Spore Hero is text-based and that means your kiddos will have to read and retain what they’ve read to understand and solve their quests and challenges.

Aside from reading skills, Spore Hero also offers an opportunity to sharpen your kiddo’s map skills.  Although you can just run around your character’s new world haphazardly, it’s best if you use the map feature to get a sense of where you are and where you need to go.  The map feature will have your kiddos reading maps, understanding map symbology and using the symbology to find what they need, as well as translating their position and the position of their destination on the map into “real world” visuals to help them get around.

We’ve already discussed the creature creation portion of Spore Hero above, but I thought it’s worth reiterating that it has a good, positive influence on sparking that little artist inside of your kiddo.  The creature creation process is so much fun and so silly, but at the same time it provides a message to kids that there is no limit to creativity and you can make your creatures look however you want them too. Like I said, our kids loved this part and laughed themselves silly with the fun creatures they created.

OK, I know evolution is always a touchy subject, but I’m going to touch on it anyway.  Yes, your kids will get the chance to “create” a creature and “evolve” it over time to be able to adapt to it’s surroundings and challenges.  I’m not personally offended by this idea, but, if you or your children are sensitive to the whole evolution/creation idea, you might want to take into consideration that it does form the basis of the Spore Hero story.

Golden Egg Rating

Overall, we give Spore Hero 4.5 out of 5 Golden Eggs.  The lighthearted adventure, engaging and simple gameplay, high level of creativity (both by the game makers and the game players) made Spore Hero super enjoyable.  Simply put, this was really one fun and entertaining game.  The only drawback was the rendering speed and frame rate gaffs during the fight scenes, but that didn’t detract too much overall from the quality of Spore Hero.

Slideshow and Screenshots

Check out the lightbox slideshow below for images of the new game Spore Hero. Simply click on a thumbnail to start the slideshow. Details and information for each screenshot are located at the bottom of the image in the slideshow. Images courtesy of Electronic Arts.

FTC Required Disclosure Statement

FiveHens.com received a free review copy of Spore Hero from Electronic Arts in order to provide you with this review. Although the product was provided to us free of charge, that in no way affected this review in either a positive or negative way. For more information about the new FTC blogger disclosure rules, please visit here for the full text of the code.