Review: Spore Hero Arena
What happens when you take 3 great things; Spore, mini-games, and fighting, mixing them all together? The result is Spore Hero Arena. This game shows you that the Spore series does not just have to be a game about civilization, clearly stated in the title suggesting a more in-depth take on combat. That being said, lets dive in!
A picture of the nice Evolution Chamber, too bad this is the only nice thing in the game.
The game starts out in a laboratory which is later referred to as the "Evolution Chamber". This is where you get to create the first phase of your Spore creature. The range of tools have been slimmed down drastically compared to the original, prompting you to choose a body, mouth, eyes, and so on, so forth. Much like the other games, the placement of the body pieces may affect your experience later on. After you create your creature, the actual story (if you want to call it that) begins.
You wake up to find out that your ship has crash landed on a green planet. This planet has a wide range of exotic ecosystems in which you are stalked by another creature who portrays himself to be your mentor throughout the game, his name is Yeedo. He tells you that back in the day, he made medals for the Heroes, which were the strongest of the strongest fighters. The medals he made for the Heroes act like "The Ring" from Lord of The Rings, as it corrupts the Heroes with greed. Yeedo kept one for himself, and he is corrupted too. He starts to freak out, and then you have to fight him until he calms down. You then find out that you are one of the "chosen ones", because a diamond that you picked up before (at the beginning of the story) makes you immune to the power of the medals. Yeedo then sends you on a mission to fight the heroes of the universe and collect all the medals. Pretty basic storyline, but it somewhat keeps you going, but a storyline like this can only keep you going for so long.
He then tells you to either eat a plant and become mainly a herbivore, eat an animal and mainly become a carnivore, or get the best of both worlds and become an omnivore. After that, Yeedo tells you to get a battery that is hidden in a capsule, and then to bring it back to the ship. After this happens, you are then zapped into the ship, and Yeedo shows you around. The main control deck is used to change planets (which to change you have to draw a line with your stylus from one planet to the next), and you can also access the Spore-pedia from there. The Spore-pedia keeps track of every creature that you come across on your adventures, but doesn’t really offer too much besides keeping track of the creatures.
You then are prompted to go back into the evolution chamber, where you once again am able to edit your creature, but this time have the add-on of Bio Powers. These Bio Powers are like magical powers in FF games, as they require energy, which is basically the equivelant of mana (I will elaborate more on this when we get to fighting). From there on out, there is the main gameplay, which I will add, is not enjoyable.
An example of one of the fights in the game
The main goal of each planet is to meet each creature on your map (which is displayed on the top screen) that gives you a diamond, and play a mini-game for that diamond. The mini-games involve racing, a hybrid of whac-a-mole and shooting range, and then the main mini-game, fighting. The fighting consists of a couple other enemies, which you must beat with your normal fighting moves, or your special Bio-Skills, which require the energy to function. This energy is spawned all over the arena (which is very small to begin with). The fighting system as a whole could have been done a lot better, and you can clearly tell that there is almost no effort shown. After you make it through those not fun, badly controlled mini-games, you then have to go to the final arena, and battle a boss to get the crystal, and then you move onto the next planet. The boss fights are generally easy, and the technique that I used is just hide in a corner, watch the other 3 CPU’s fight to the death, and then come out and defeat the last one standing. Plain, simple, boring.
The music in this game is "ok" at the most, containing a mix of music that sounds a lot like games "Banjo Kazooie", "Pokemon", and "Halo" (if it were a DS game, that is). Also, the sound affects from the creatures that are talking can get really annoying sometimes. Do you remember those dreaded Zubat call from the Pokemon games that hurt your ears? Well, the sounds of some of the creatures talking finishes off the last part of your ears that were still there.
The multiplayer aspect of the game doesn’t stand out at all, besides just having a couple wi-fi functions, but that is always good to get into a game, as many DS games that are good don’t even have that.
The game’s graphics are pretty well done, but not up to par with DS standards of today
The graphics for the game are decent at the most, having 3d textures reminiscent to the original graphics of Super Mario 64 DS, which was when the DS launched, way before they even bothered to tap its potential. I will give that the game had nice 3D models of the creatures in the Evolution Chamber, but outside of that the graphics are just "decent".
The controls for this game are really bad, and not really well thought out. You control your character from the touch screen, and use attacks with the D-pad. This would make it very hard to take the game on the go, and made me sit in some weird positions, and didn’t feel natural at all to play.
Overall, there are many other games that I can think of that are worse than Spore Hero Arena. Was it the worst game I ever played? No, but it certainly wasn’t the best either. This game seems to attract the casual, and leaves it to the hardcore to figure out what to do. There were many times when I got stuck, and not being a casual gamer makes me wonder what kinds of trouble some "average joes" experienced when trying to pick up the game. They could have made the game worse, but I guess the graphics aren’t that bad, so that helps the game look better than it is.
