Editor
PVP
Loot
PVE1
PVE2
Second: An introduction.
Dark spore is basically an action-rpg dungeon crawler game with a few twists, the most obvious one being the fact that it is built around Spore's creature creator. Think of it as Spore + Torchlight in space. Watch the videos for more details.
Third: The Beta
So I've been playing the closed beta pretty much since I woke up this morning, and first impressions are good. The game runs fairly smoothly, everything works the way it's supposed to and the experience is fun.
The actual gameplay is a lot of fun. You choose a squad of 3 characters (there are a large number of these) to take on a mission. You control one character at a time, and can switch between them freely (with a cooldown). Each character has its own unique array of skills and abilities. Based on the character's I've used and read about, these abilities vary widely which is nice. Among a character's abilities is its Squad Ability. This is an ability that any squad member can use so long as the character is in the squad. This lets you combine different abilities and skills in different, fun ways. For example, one character has a shared ability that does damage to enemies nearby, and another character has an ability that sucks units towards itself. These two can be combined for devestating effect, and that's one example.
Each character has only a few skills, but the number of characters allows you to customize your playstyle massively.
The loot system works well, in team games loot is shared (everyone rolls 1-100, highest keeps the item when it's picked up) but MUCH more loot drops with more players so it's definitely worth partying up. You can add loot to your characters in the editor.
The editor itself was a bit of a dissapointment. You can place items on your character as you wish, but the characters themselves can only be edited in minor ways (hey, my dude has bigger feet now! yay!). The interface is pretty well organized, but it often takes a long time to load between menu screens (though by release I'm guessing things like this will be ironed out).
The art is good, even if it may look like the devs put more time into the backgrounds of the levels than they did with the levels themselves (that said, the backgrounds are actually quite awesome). The Darkspore (enemies) are varied based on where your mission is happening, and generally all of the animations are good-looking and smooth. The sound design is solid enough that it doesn't detract from the game, but it's not particularily special either.
There was no PvP in this beta test, but hopefully I'll be able to report on that for the next one.
Bottom Line: I can see myself buying this game in the future. It's hella fun to play, especially with other people. I feel like I'm forgetting something, but whatever. I'll post if I remember.
Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Feb 19 2011, 6:25 pm by Symmetry.
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.. and Yea.. it does feel good when you get a game that's awesome and you had to gamble for it...
what exactly makes you think I haven't played it, other than my "screw waiting, I'm preordering" (which can be interpreted as "I don't want to wait to buy this after it's released")?