Spore (mobile)

Spore seems to be wowing all and sundry on the PC. Regular blogs on Google Readers everywhere have been reduced to the brief but geeky: "Sorry, I'm a bit behind with the blog, Spore is just too great."

Which is all well and dandy, but can the franchise successfully translate to the mobile arena? Well unfortunately, not quite.

Spore is just one of the thousands of mobile games which seem to overestimate the ease of using a clunky number pad to control a character. The first stage of the game has players navigating a primordial soup, gobbling up bacteria and avoiding the nastier creatures like some sort of pre-historic Pac-man. As fun as that may sound, hand-cramp jolting controls - which demand that player's hit ‘ok' or ‘5' to eat something at practically the same time as a directional button - threaten to render the whole game incredibly frustrating. So much so, that the difficulty curve is deceptively steep, if only to get used to guiding your tentacle blob between dangers.

Yet the popular, customisable aspect to Spore, which made the PC version so popular, is present on a 2D scale in this little package. After completing every few levels, a neat little feature allows you to upgrade and redesign your creature as it evolves and grows bigger. Do you choose speed and agility over strength, or just stick as many tails and eyes on the blob as you can, daub it in the colours of Aston Villa and hope for the best? An infinite number of choices are yours.

As your creature grows and moves up the food chain, aspects of the levels do get easier. Yet, unlike the PC game which spans genres once the players emerges from the ocean, the mobile game seems content as a Pac-Man clone. The player moves up the food chain and the predators get bigger, but the same top-down mantra of eat, dodge and avoid seems to permeate throughout.

As such, despite the enormous sense of achievement in finally grasping the fiddly controls of Spore, it all just becomes a tad repetitive, with minor deviations in levels (ie coaxing predators in attacking each other and such) not really adding enough diversity to what's a surprisingly one-dimensional game.