The way the hype machine was going on about Spore along with its several delays, it was hard not to draw unfavorable comparisons to Fable. Its premise: guiding a species’ evolutionary development from a unicellular stage through its first steps into outer space was wildly ambitious, and like Fable, captured the imagination of gamers everywhere. And then, before release, Will Wright indicated that the game was being overhyped. The candor was appreciated: the final product was disappointing. Not simply because it didn’t fulfill gamers’ wild expectations, but moreso that it’s just not a very good game in its own right.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. Like other Maxis games, this one has a very charming feel. The character animations, layout, music, and environment all promote a cheerful, capricious atmosphere. And as anyone who played around with the free creature creator demo can tell you, the character creating process is extremely robust. In an extremely nice touch, if you play the game online, the game randomly downloads and populates the worlds with creatures other players have created. You quickly realize that with some ingenuity and imagination, you can most likely create anything you put your mind to.

But that’s also a bit of the problem. The whole draw of the game, constantly evolving, is sort of missing a compelling evolution mechanic. Instead of some sort of an iterative process, you control every aspect of your species’ look and abilities. The only limiting factor is the cost of purchasing new bits for your species from the character creator. You get more of these points by performing actions that lead your species down their evolutionary path, the actions being dependent on what stage you’re in. In the cellular stage it’s all about eating either plants or bits of other animals. In the creature stage it’s about making friends or killing them off. In the tribal stage it’s about making allies or wiping other tribes off the face of the earth etc etc. The idea is to become the dominant species(and later nation) at every level, and as you can see, this can be accomplished through peaceful or aggressive means, or even a mix between the two. This is the only way your actions guide your evolution, and it’s a bit of a pity because it doesn’t even really matter that much, other than the advantages you’re given at every stage that reinforce your respective approach to cementing your species’ absolute dominion over all living things.

So, it’s safe to say user actions don’t really drive evolution. It’s basically you at the wheel the entire time, and aside from your species being set in their appearance after the second stage, you’re never locked into a specific course of action. And it’s hard to argue against more freedom. After all, if players wanted to pretend this was a more evolution oriented game, they could easily engineer the experience themselves. The problem is that the game isn’t just you tinkering with the creature creator, although that might have been a more favorable experience. The rest of the game is for the most part a set of startlingly mediocre games inspired by more refined ones. The impression that you’re playing stripped down versions of Flow, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires, Civilization, finishing off with an amalgam of space sims is prevalent throughout. And there’s nothing remotely interesting about any stage. It’s all been done before, and done better. And when there’s not even a real sense of continuity in the evolution, and the only thing tying these mediocre games together is your little freak species, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it.

At day’s end, the game’s a bit of a disappointment. Not a colossal one, but perhaps that makes it even more frustrating because it simply could have been better, and evidently so. Hopefully other developers will take note of Spore’s attempt at a compelling amalgam of genre games. Until then, you can calways content yourself with staring at the latest oddity to crawl out from the depths of the internet on to your planet. Or don’t. It can sort of bugger esteem for your creative abilities.

With the addition of a Japanese faction to EA’s Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, staff here at Big Game Box were curious as to how our friends across the other, other pond were taking it. Suffice to say that we were surprised.

At time of writing, the Hell March 3 trailer for the game in question had over 500,670 views and 27,578 comments on video-sharing site nico nico douga – uploaded under the title gaijin ga souzou shita totetsu mo nai nihon ga detekuru geemu (’a game with a preposterous foreigner-envisaged version of Japan’). We’ve provided a few selected comments for your perusal below:

“Holy shit, we’re awesome!”

“Expect nothing less from the country of technology!”

“Oh shit, there go our state secrets!”

Reception on Japanese internet forum 2ch seems positive overall, with some users likening EA LA’s over-the-top depiction of Japan in Red Alert 3 to From Software’s depiction of America in presidential mech action game Metal Wolf Chaos (and if you haven’t heard of that, you owe it to yourself to see this).

It’s not all good news, though - Korean site CNB News reports on a Korean politician’s condemnation of the game’s 15+ classification for its glorification of Japanese militarism, alleging that the classification board had not taken the historical issues between the two nations fully into account when making its decision.

Some of us wonder whether a game with sonic dolphins and bionic war bears should be taken all that seriously.

Crackdown is a game like, well, many others. A third-person action-sandbox game from Microsoft and Real Time Worlds, Crackdown is set in the crime-ridden world of the near future, which has apparently been stricken with some kind of faux cel-shading effect, making everything look colorful and pretty. Most open-ended games of this genre tend be more structured than truly “open”, but Crackdown manages to do the exact opposite: provide an extremely open style of play while lacking just about any story or mission structure whatsoever. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course.

Crackdown puts the player in the role of the Agent, a genetically augmented operative of “The Agency”, which has somehow become the only organization left on the planet capable of fighting crime effectively. Situated in a massive tower called The Keep on a central island between three larger land masses, the Agency attempts to clean up the three largest criminal syndicates plaguing the surrounding Pacific City. The player is given a brief summary of the situation and is told they need to go out and kill a bunch of people to make the streets safe for the law abiding once more. That’s the story, right there. I’m not even joking. It all basically breaks down to “You’re this dude, this city is filthy with crime, go kill these dudes and clean up”, and then turns you lose to go about your business as you see fit. While this sounds like a pathetic lack of the detail, the game doesn’t even attempt to tell a story to begin with, so it’s really not a flaw. The game doesn’t even feature missions as we’re used to them, and presents the tasks the player needs to complete to eventually bring down each syndicate as completely optional. Sure, you can directly attack each syndicate’s boss head-on if you want, but killing their subordinates first will make the job much less of a pain in the ass. Crackdown is, if anything, a true sandbox game, meant to give the player as much freedom as possible while providing a few goals to further the development of the player character’s skills.

The Agent has several core skills that upgrade as the player does certain things, like killing enemies with hand-to-hand combat, blowing stuff up, shooting people, etc. As the player performs these actions, they’ll collect what basically amount to experience points, eventually allowing the skills to be significantly upgraded beyond their initial levels. While the Agent is stronger, faster, and a better jumper than a normal human to begin with, at their peak these skills allow the player to lift and throw vehicles the size of a bus, run as fast as some cars, and jump from rooftop to rooftop in thirty foot leaps. The jumping factor, as well as the ability to scale buildings in a slightly parkour fashion, give Crackdown a surprising feeling of verticality, generally uncommon to these types of games.

Crackdown sounds pretty much like you’d expect a game with tons of explosions, gunfire, and pedestrians to sound, so there’s not much there that stands out. There’s no story whatsoever, so the only dialogue and voice acting the player encounters is through NPCs as the player is running through, around, and over them. The game’s narrator, however, is an incredibly annoying aspect of the game. While the voice work is exemplary, the narrator constantly repeats the same messages throughout the game, and it’s rather grating to be forced to listen to tutorial advice after you’ve played the game for thirty hours. Aside from that, the narrator will occasionally deliver messages about things you’ve done several minutes after you’ve actually done them, which really makes no sense. These are the game’s greatest technical flaws, and they’re compounded by not being able to turn the narrator’s voice off in any way.

Crackdown is a game a lot of people purchased when it launched due to the inclusion of the Halo 3 beta, but fortunately for me, I didn’t have a 360 at the time of release. Lets be clear that this is not a game I would have dropped sixty dollars on by far, but for what I did pay, a paltry fifteen bucks, it’s a steal. If you’ve yet to play this unique sandbox title, and can find it on the cheap, it’s definitely worth your attention.