Design your own creature, edit its stats and abilities and try to make sure that it’s always on the top of the food chain, the king (or queen) of all creatures! This is, in just one sentence, what Spore Islands is about. And yes, if the name sounds familiar, it is: the game is based on Electronic Arts’ Spore simulation game, but this one can be played completely free of charge on Facebook!
Of course, all similarities between Spore and Spore Islands are limited to the name and the overall feel of the game – the Facebook title is far less complex, challenging and customizable compared to its full budget cousin. Still, it’s a nice play every now and then (you are not required to log in daily or every X hours to have fun playing it) and you’re going to find out a bit more about the game below!
When the game first starts, you will have to create your creature by selecting a few attributes. These are divided into four categories: Metabolism, Senses, Strength, Life. Each has its own subcategory, like Speed, Stamina, Threat Detect, Attack or Defense and so on. Depending on the stats of your creature, its shape will change but it will still always look like a happy, cuddly pet. Which might not be the case for all creatures – as it stands for my ferocious attacker I’ve named “Cuddly”.
After you create your own creature in Spore Islands, there are a few things you can do: invite a few friends over and wait for them to join or randomly create some AI-controlled creatures and hop into the wild to watch your creature in action. Here is where the strategy part comes into play: if you notice that your creature becomes breakfast for all the other creatures on the island, or dies too fast of hunger of old age, you should clearly tweak it a little bit. Increase the defense and decrease the attack (which is worthless for a full vegetarian!), make your creature faster, change its diet and so on.
The nice part in Spore Islands comes, obviously, when you play against your friends (or human players) who will keep tweaking their creatures too making the battle for supremacy really intense and wonderful. Playing against the computer becomes boring pretty quick since the AI will never tweak the creatures so you’ll be able to exploit their weak points.
Unfortunately for Spore Islands, the lack of complexity is one of its main problems and you might get pretty soon bored by the game – there are barely any achievements for you to get and just few challenges. But if you simply love to be a God and guide your creatures to total world domination, you’ll certainly have fun playing Spore Islands.
