While EA's Spore franchise hasn't quite taken the gaming world by storm like fellow Will Wright created sensation The Sims, that hasn't stopped the publisher from releasing a string of Spore-related expansions and spin-offs on various platforms.  Nintendo's consoles seem to be the biggest recipient of them lately, which begs the question whether developer Maxis would nurture their breakthrough idea and help it grow.  This question arose as I played through Spore Hero on the Wii, which tries to match the creature-creation aspects of the franchise with a fixed-point battles for home console users.  But was this the right evolutionary decision?

Much of Spore Hero's design comes from Spore Creatures on the DS (not to be confused with the recent Spore Hero Arena), where discards the concept of playing god with a entire race of species like the original, instead limiting the experience to one creature dropped on a unfamiliar world and gradually forced to evolve along the way, all the while exploring and subjecting yourself to various objectives. This obviously goes hand-in-hand with helping the usually friendly native spore tribes and foiling your arch-nemesis as he/she/whatever spreads distinctively evil red rocks across the planet, obviously it’s up to you to right this wrong.

The game is liberally borrows much its gaming mechanics from last year’s DS title by working your way through world and eventually gain an assortment of new body parts and special abilities, and with each new bodily addition granting more enhancements and more exploration throughout. The basics are thankfully intact but only so much of it translates into a satisfactory Spore game, as many would expect customization and evolutionary freedom isn’t as expansive, being content to simply accommodate this with the most average of third-person platform elements and Wii motion controls. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but certainly is a little disappointing when you consider the potential Spore can offer.

The look of Spore is retained through colorful and generally interesting to look at designs, which range from the mildly bizarre to outright crazy - it doesn’t compare to its PC counterpart but is pretty open to the imagination regardless. Soon after this the creativity quickly becomes unimportant where most enemy encounters simply gives way to the rudimentary option of choosing the right limb to add to your creature, this also means that everything from the battles to the mini-game aren’t that interesting to play either.

I could go on how the largely uninspired Spore Hero for the Wii manages to miss a great opportunity to maximize the vastly creative potential of the Spore franchise to the home console, only to serve up a mildly tame platform experience.  But to be honest, there is some entertainment here for those intrigued by the prospect of creating their own living concoction, and no doubt will probably result in even more oddball creature-creations and matches for dedicated players.  Regardless, the adventure should be enough for anyone to moderately play through at least, if only that.  At least its not the complete disaster its DS-counterpart is.