I'm surprised at how much fun I've been having with the
Darkspore beta. That said, I'm not smart enough to tell if it's really any good by itself or if it's just that the part of my brain that gets pleasure hormones from Diablo-type games hasn't been tickled since Torchlight.
It's got the Spore customization thing, but it's really more of a Pimp My Alien deal because you have to work with preset body shapes; that's a missed opportunity, but if you look at it another way, that means you can more easily identify stuff at a glance. If you see one of your party members is using the regular-sized blue humanoid with wrist-mounted blades, you he's got the Haste aura and the time stop skills, and if you see the four-legged tree guy, you know that's the healer, and so on.
The thing is, the drops you get from enemies are usually weapons, equipment, or body parts, each with the typical random stat effects. You can only ever equip one of each type, and they have race restrictions, but there's a function that strips all the stats and restrictions from items and allows you to put them on any of your character's bodies. Essentially, if you find something that looks cool but isn't very good, you can keep it as a decoration. There's only ever one slot for, say, eyes, but if you've got decorative eyes then you can cover your guy with them without affecting his stats.
When you go into a mission, you choose three of your characters, and they go together. You only ever use one at a time, but each of them has a skill that is shared with the entire squad. By which I mean, each character has its three personal skills, plus one shared skill from each of his squadmates. It took me a while to realize how it worked, but it's actually a lot of fun to mix and match abilities.
For example:
Hero A has skills
I, II and III. Skill
III is shared among the party. In battle, he can use skills
I, II, III,
VI and
IX.
Hero B has skills
IV, V and VI. Skill
VI is shared among the party. In battle, he can use skills
IV, V, VI,
III and
IX.
Hero C has skills
VII, VIII and IX. Skill
IX is shared among the party. In battle, he can use skills
VII, VIII, IX,
III and
VI.
So I can use a slow melee tank, squad him up with a spellcaster and a quick fighter, and suddenly the slow guy can throw lightning bolts and use a long-range dash attack. As you progress in the game you unlock more and more character types each with their own skills, so even though each of them only has three special moves of its own, it doesn't feel like there's a shortage of ways to kill stuff.
It gets even more fun once you go in multiplayer, because each of the possible four players has his own squad of three. Skills aren't shared between players, but there's a lot of stuff that synergizes well so there's usually something cool going on.
So yeah, long story short the beta ends on Friday and if I'm not sick of it by then it's probably a purchase... even though giving money to anything even remotely connected to Will Wright makes me feel like I'm supporting terrorism.
