As your giant penis space ship penetrates the atmosphere and you burst into the great wide beyond, the scope of the game and the difficulty level rises so suddenly that you begin to think that the last 4 or 5 hours of gameplay have been, essentially, pointless.
This is the game. This is where everything is hidden. It plays almost exactly like Elite, with extra’s such as terraforming and the likes. There are still plenty of niggles: Constantly having to revisit planets that are under attack (Because, apparently, you’re the only space ship in the entire universe, unless someone wants to attack you) or having to go back and forth between planets to pick up Spice in order to sell it on so you have money to do anything... It’s all a little repetitive at first, though a much welcome break from the simplicity of the initial stages.
The complexity spike here is rather remarkable. I can’t imagine anyone from the Sims crowd (Which Will Wright has clearly aimed for with the previous stages) would ever get or understand this. Your sister or your mother would not, for instance, enjoy being gangbanged by a group of aliens just because you accidentally entered their particular area of the universe. They wouldn’t get the subtle Terrascoring of the planets, increasing/decreasing the temperatures or atmosphere, then stablising it with organisms in order to make it more habitable. They wouldn’t get this. So here lies the problem.
In making a game that’s casual for the casual market, then instantly changing everything with the penultimate stage, there’s a bit of a brick wall built down the middle. Gamers will no doubt skip straight to the Space stage with any future characters they make, while the casual market will no doubt drool endlessly with gaping eyes once they see their first star system, then switch off and start making penis monsters again.
The Space Stage, for people like us, is wonderful. There’s a great deal of depth, there’s tonnes to find, there’s a constant barrage of things to do or information to process and one massively annoying case of crashing once in a while (With no auto-save) ensuring you become furious with the game should you forget to save often. Surely in this day and age, every game should include an autosave... Or is that not casual enough?
Overall then, I do reccomend it. In fact, I almost reccomend it more to the gamer crowd than the casual crowd. Once you push past those initial stages (Which, admittedly, at first glance, feel quite fun) you’re left with a brilliant game of intergalactic creativity. Creating creatures in the main menu to drop into the Universe never gets old, as the editor is absolutely brilliant and stomach-grampingly funny at times (Did I mention you could make genital creatures?).
As good as all that is, however, it also has a lot of basic flaws which detract from it’s score, amongst all the other things. The constantly changing controls are a nuisance, and none of them are really that good anyway. Not being able to move the camera around your Space Ship while visiting planets is stupid. The GTA4 annoyance of "If you don’t talk to me constantly then I’m going in a huff with you" style aliens begin to grate. The pointlessness of the initial stages. Essentially cosmetic creatures. Lack of autosave...
It’s all a shame that, should Will have set his heights a little higher, and realised that Casual gamers aren’t necessarily the dumbed down single cell organisms he seems to think they are, this could have been absolutely wonderful. As it stands, it’s a fantastic project, one that’ll have you gasping more than a couple of times, but it’s far from the fantastic game it could have been.
