Darkspore Previews

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Written by BuckGB on February 15th, 2011

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When I first started playing, I felt like I was reliving childhood memories of browsing through the Toys-R-Us action figure aisles. A hulking purple skeleton that smashes face with a giant axe? Awesome! Floating tentacle-teeth that shoot black holes which randomly teleport you? Cool! I even quickly grew attached to a favorite hero: Vex the Chrono Shifter, a DPS'er who could freeze and rewind time. Each member of your squad has two active abilities and one global ability that carries over between each hero. One of my favorite combos was having Blitz, the Storm Striker's plasmaball shield combined with Vex's time lapse burst damage. The UI is incredibly clean and easy to understand, and each level has bonus objectives for better chances of rare loot.

But I have to admit that by level 7, I was already burnt out. The graphics and landscapes look amazing, but the levels are utterly boring, and being forced to back-track through an empty dungeon feels as crappy now as it did in 2000. Sure, there are 100 heroes with their own backstories to learn about and collect, but when each of them only has three unique abilities, you've seen all they have to offer in a flash. Darkspore almost forces you to not get attached to one hero: even though I loved using Vex, I could only cast his Chronoblink so many times before I just didn't care anymore. The backstory of the Crogenitors is initially interesting, but when none of the mission levels provide any sense of continuity, interest fades fast. PvP fights are limited to 1v1 or 2v2, and offer some straightforward-but-short-lived fun in a Marvel vs Capcom kind of way.

Darkspore uses an AI director inspired by the Left 4 Dead series that adjusts the game's difficulty according to hero levels, how many players there are, and whether or not you've played the level before. So you might see more advanced creatures appear as you replay a level for the second or third time. At the end of a mission, players can "cash out" and roll for a rare item. Alternatively, they can skip the chance to equip heroes with better weapons and go straight into the next mission. Continuing on means a higher chance for very rare items and more item rolls on cash out. However, players forfeit all rare item rolls if they fail during the course of a mission chain. Even so, while some heroes might have come close during certain boss battles, having a character actually die was a very rare event, especially in co-op.

We noticed that the randomness of loot drops could cause heroes to fall behind in levels. Unless you visit the currently scantly stocked item store regularly to purchase new equipment, you could end up getting a lot of drops for a certain element but not enough of another. The game could also benefit from allowing players to bind powers to the right mouse button instead of using it for attack, which is already handled by the left button. Additionally, there needs to be an overhead map so players can check to see what areas have been explored.

Darkspore offers another way though, with a gambling system linked to your victory. Finish a map and you're offered a chance to effectively roll for a nice bit of rare kit. Alternatively, you can gamble that chance, play the next level, and potentially get something much better. At the start of the campaign you can only win a couple of maps before you have to cash out, but as your character level rises, so can the stakes. It's a gimmick, but quite a clever one.

Nothing about Darkspore is likely to set the gaming world on fire, at least not as long as Fox News doesn't get it into their heads that its name is an anagram of (SATAN IS MY MASTER) or something, and it's certainly no Spore in terms of ambition. If anything, that lineage is a detriment, not simply because Originalspore never took off, but because it makes the steps backward in terms of freedom and scope so much more noticeable than if it had just been a new game called Darkswarm, or ideally, something even less 90s and shit. On its own terms though, Spore may have given up on playing God, but Darkspore is definitely in with a good chance of hacking its way into a comfortable new niche at least online, if probably not for solo play.

In between levels I'm given the chance to attach items I've purchased or looted to my Heroes using an interface pulled directly from Spore. In the editor I can place items I've acquired directly onto my Heroes, adding to their statistics while cosmetically altering them to my liking.

I can't go hog-wild, however. Each piece has a DNA cost, and each Hero has a DNA limit. DNA points acquired during the campaign mode will give your Heroes more room for improvement, so the more you play a certain character the better he, she, or it will become.

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