iAppLover

Anyone who’s into technology knows the game Spore by now –either by the hype that the game brought with it or the subsequent pirating disaster in the weeks before and after it came out. Now, people can bring Spore on the road with them with Spore Origins, which is easily available on the iPhone.

Of course, it’s fairly difficult to cram a game with so much width into a phone, so EA decided to just focus on the wriggly, spiky and bug eyed first phase where you’re a cell.

Spore Origins, due to this little change becomes a casual game and thus, should be a warning looking for the Sims experience with their cells on the road. It becomes a brother to a game familiar to many people – Freezing Frenzy. Bite combos or successive bites over bonuses. There are deeper aspects to the game beyond it, which give it more depth than you would expect.

Like anything at the bottom of the evolutionary scale or more precisely, the food chain, you’ll be running away from most stuff when you first start Spore Origins. Much like the game that inspired this mobile game, you get to choose how to grow your little cell. You could develop your cute little cell into a defensive monster, quick as a jab and full of defensive spikes that you could also use for a bumpy form of offense, to a monster that consumes anything in sight with a monstrous number of mouths and eyes on it.

Spore Origins takes its cue from the original version by copying its intuitive interface. Click and drag’s the way it works. The level of customization can draw in a player, especially as it can use photos onboard your iPhone to further customize your little critter. Your critter’s movement is based on the way you tilt your iPhone – this particular feature works pretty well.

While this is definitely targeted towards the casual market, it still has some appeal to the hardcore gaming market, despite the short levels thanks to the customization available. When you whittle it down past all the bells and whistles, it’s a game about tilting your potentially freakish critter into other sometimes frightening critters – and maybe that’s fun enough for some people.

While it cannot connect a network and thus download new creatures for you to battle with, it’s a good compliment to the desktop computer game and a strong game all on its own. For a portable game, it can remain fresh and entertaining even with hours of gameplay on it.