SporeCraft
March 31, 2010
Sporecraft is a flash-based real-time-strategy game that gives you control over a team of vicious microorganisms. This of course implies the fun conceit of the petri dish as map, and Sporecraft implores the player to assert his or her dominance over the entirety of the dish.
SporeCraft’s economy is built around two simple resources: DNA, your total pool of which increases gradually over time and is monopolized by your force of microorganisms, and Nutrients, which one must gather. Your units can be improved by investing DNA in any of the four (A, T, G, C) nucleobases. Which immediately brings about what could be a stumbling block for some new players: while the mechanics are relatively simple, the microbiological jargon can be an impediment, and the game’s tool-tips are chock-full of information.
Rather than building up bases, of course, your team of paramecia increases its size through mitosis, which increases in cost depending on the strength of the unit. This provides an interesting tension to gameplay, as your strongest units in the field also serve as the breeding ground for developing further strong units.
Sporecraft controls intuitively and well if the genre itself is comfortable to you, and is an interesting and clean implementation of mechanics and flavor.
Filed under: Strategy Games