You can really push the bar out here and have the wildest looking animal possible, but you might find when it comes time to add the legs or arms that you've run out of options.Īfter selecting the "Eyelien" eyes (+1 to charm bonus), "Panhear" ears (+2 to charm) and "Sporacles" nose (+1 to charm) our creature was starting to take shape.
Located at the top of the screen, it's a bar that measures the level of complexity your creature has achieved with each body part addition. Keeping this all under control is the Complexity Meter. We therefore duly stacked on the "Handibles" we'd reluctantly passed on previously. You can even hear the mating call! We were also pleased to find that the body parts stack, so you can actually combine two different mouths (for example) to get the benefits of both. Each item also has some kind of benefit for the host creature just glancing at the mouth selection we could see attribute points for biting, spitting and singing, and further classification between herbivore, carnivore and omnivore. There's the choice between dozens of bizarre designs (some recognizable from the world around us, some you'd have to go back a few million years to find) and while we were tempted to use the "Handibles" due to their extreme pincer design, in the end we settled on a slightly more practical design called the "Pincernaut", which looked more like something you'd find on a wood lice.Įach body part you select has a cost - the monetary system is DNA points, and you start with 2000. You can attach parts to your creature in pretty much any order, but for the sake of simplicity we stuck with the order in which the menus are presented, starting with the mouth. This process may seem daunting at first, but without even so much as a cursory glance at the instructions we managed the entire process with ease. With a blank slate in the form of a limbless blob in the middle of the screen, we were tasked with choosing between 288 various body parts in a number of menus and attaching them to create the most outlandish animal possible. There is no actual Spore gameplay included, but you can share your creatures amongst friends or even upload videos of them directly to YouTube.Īt EA HQ, we fired up the Creature Creator and got stuck in.
Priced at just NZ$14.99, the Creature Creator is designed to introduce gamers to the complex Spore universe by allowing them to create any number of outlandish creatures, which can then be imported to the full retail version of Spore at a later date. Presumably the game is undergoing some last-minute tweaking, so to build up anticipation Electronic Arts will release the Spore Creature Creator on the 20th June. Spore was initially intended to be called Sim Everything, a working title that adequately describes the care and attention to detail Wright has promised to deliver at the September launch. There's no doubt that Will Wright's Spore is going to be one of the biggest titles of the year.