Spore Hero Arena

So you’ve seen what the Wii version of Spore looks like.  Time to cast an eye over its DS sibling as we tinker with Spore Hero Arena from EA and Maxis.

Of all the games least likely to receive a conversion from PC to DS, Spore would probably have been at the top of my list.  It’s a sprawling game that manages to make the term ‘god sim’ feel inadequate, as you’re tasked with guiding a life form from single-celled lifeform to galaxy-conquering overlord, evolving and shaping them as you see fit over millions of years.  There is no way any of that could fit on a DS.  And yet here we have Spore Hero Arena, a handheld version of the love it/hate it PC game, promising to let us play God in the palm of our hands.

Of course, as you’ve probably seen, not even the Wii could handle a straight adaptation, which is why Maxis most likely chose to go a slightly more different route.  You play a creature who, for the benefit of this review, we’ll refer to as ‘Rando’.  Rando is puttering about the galaxy in his spaceship, minding his own business, when it’s suddenly hit by a stray blue asteroid, and he’s forced to crash land on a nearby planet.  There, he encounters an alien who tells him of a load of strange medals forged from another red asteroid that he made long ago.  The medals made everyone who owned them go crazy, but, armed with shards of the blue asteroid, Rando seems immune to their effects.  So, armed with his anti-insanity shinies, Rando goes off to, ahem, ‘free’ the other owners from their madness-creating shinies.  Because you can’t be a hero until you’ve robbed everyone around you blind.

Starting off, you’re presented with a very basic version of the PC’s creature creator.  You choose one of about a dozen or so basic body types, then staple bodyparts on – arms, feet, eyes and so on – in order to make your pet abomination.  You’re limited to a handful of parts at the beginning, but extras are unlocked by completing challenges, travelling to new areas or just by picking them up lying around.   Each part affects your attack, defence, and so on, and messing about, seeing what manner of genetic atrocity you can create, as in the PC version, is a heck of a lot of fun.

Of course, that’s more or less where the fun ends.

Once you beam down to a planet, you quickly encounter some of the planet’s natives, who will either test your strength or ask for a favour or some-such.  Combat is basically similar to Smash Bros, of all things – beat your foe until they’re weak enough, then boot them off the playing stage.  Win, and you’ll be rewarded with a fragment of blue meteor (collect four, beat the boss and move on to the next stage) or a new body part to make you, hopefully, stronger.  Most creatures have two challenges, but generally, the second is just the first, but with more enemies or a shorter time limit.  The challenges themselves are usually along the lines of ‘beat up X number of opponents in Y number of seconds’, and they start off very easy before descending into absolute “you’ve got to be [CENSORED]ing kidding me” territory.

I’ll give you an example: several challenges require you to beat several opponents without using charge attacks (hold the attack button down for a stronger move) or bio-power (special moves triggered by filling up a bar under your life meter).  Of course, the computer’s not limited in any way, so they’ll cheerfully beat you up and down with nary a care in the world.  Which is annoying at best, but when you’re facing three enemies at the same time, with everything but your most basic moves sealed, they’ve got three lives and you have one, your fun just plummets.  Sure, it’s probably supposed to make you go back to the drawing board and work at beefing up your creature, but there’s a thin line between challenge and frustration, and this rapidly winds up on the wrong side.

Similarly, there’s a couple of CTF-style challenges, where you have to hold on to a crown to score points.  Most points at the end of a minute wins.  Now, this would be simple and fun if it weren’t for the fact that it instantly turns into what we’ll generously call “a complete clusterfrak” in seconds.  It’s physically impossible to keep the crown for more than a second at a time.  Really, I’m not kidding here, the only way I was able to win that stage was when I got stupidly lucky, was somehow ahead by 3 points, and the crown glitched into the scenery.  The AI then promptly spazzed out, running around in circles, but utterly unable to pick up the prize, leaving me to just sit and run out the timer.  This stage alone took me at least 20 tries, probably more.  And this was only the third stage.  The computer, once again, suffers no hardships like this, of course.

And it’s not even like this is a stand-alone moment, this sort of thing happens fairly regularly.  The artificial intelligence, well, isn’t.  Half the time, it runs off the edge of the stage itself, leaving you wondering what the hell just happened, the other half it puts up the kind of fight more commonly seen in cornered animals.  Your hopes of winning seem to depend entirely on how generous the AI is feeling at that given moment, as the computer will have no qualms about stunlocking you between two enemies, all but ensuring you have no chance of escaping.  Frankly, it’s unfair, and kills any fun you might be having right on the spot.

There’s the option to play most of the challenges with up to four friends, sharing your hideous mutants and beating the unholy hell out of each other with them, but the problem is, you still need to play through the single-player mode in order to get any decent bodyparts.  The fact that the two arguably most fun parts – multiplayer and the creature creator – both hinge on the most unfun part, the single player mode means you’re probably going to be spending a lot of time getting frustrated before you start having fun.

Honestly, I cannot recommend Spore Hero Arena.  It’s not just frustrating, it’s outright maddening.  The fact that I had to virtually break the game in order to pass a single stage is, quite frankly, unforgivable.  I should not, under any circumstances, be forced to outright cheat just to progress.  That, coupled with the complete randomness of the AI’s ‘moods’ means the game is far harder and far more frustrating than it has any reasonable right to be.  There is fun to be had here, but you’re going to be digging a long time to find it.

+ Creature creator from Spore is imported almost wholesale, with a few limitations

- Creature creator is awkward to get to grips with at first
- Needlessly frustrating and difficult
- Success on some stages seems to depend entirely on how charitable the AI’s feeling

Score – 4/10