Darkspore - when Diablo shagged Pikachu

And with the headline's disturbing image in your heads, let me introduce you to this fast-paced hack'n'slay RPG. If you're unfamiliar with the Spore universe, it's basically the kind of game where people create monsters, which resemble genitalia. Darkspore removes said creation process and hands you 100 pre-made monsters, instead. However, many of the upgrade parts you get to put on these monsters as you level them up resemble penises so much, you can almost literally hear the game designers giggling like little school girls.

The basic gameplay is the same thing you get in Diablo and all of its clones: You fight your way through countless isometric dungeon levels, hack hundreds of thousands of monsters to bits and collect obscene amounts of oddly colour-coded loot to make your toons more and more powerful with.
"But uncle Cat", you might say. "I already own Diablo and all of its clones! What's so special about this one?" Well, kids, if you want to know about Darkspore's unique twists on the old formula, sit down, stay a while and listen.

There are 25 unique playable characters, all of them coming in 4 different variations with unique looks and varying abilities, creating an impressive roster of 100 toons to play around with. And since it's fucking difficult to find that one favourite among all those guys, the clever makers of Darkspore have decided to let you play a squad of three heroes at a time, rather than just a single one. In a dungeon, you get to switch between your three characters of choice at any time (granted, there's a little cooldown after switching). And that's where things get interesting: You could put your favourite damage dealer on the squad, add a healer for support and grab a big, tanky fellow for those super tough boss baddies.

While you can only have one character active at a time rather than using all three of them simultaneously, the system allows you to switch toons depending on the situation. Instead of being stuck healing everyone all day, go play around with your heavy hitter and only whip out the medic when it's really necessary. And while playing a slow tank with relatively unimpressive attack skills might be boring when fighting the trash, you'll be that much more grateful to have him around when all your other characters get smashed to bits by enemies of the extra large variety. You get the idea.

Of course the whole thing is more complex than just that - there are melee and ranged damage dealers, some characters come equipped with helpful passive abilties that boost the entire party (you can team up with three more players), some guys have stealth modes and so forth. Each toon also comes with a unique squad-ability, which can be used by any member of your squad at any time. So if one of your heroes happens to have a healing skill as their squad ability, you'll get to use it with all three of your characters. Combining heroes and their abilities to create powerful and versatile squads is a lot of fun and can be incredibly rewarding, when everything works out according to plan.

There's also a lot of fiddling around with aforementioned truckloads of gear. You will find chest plates, shields, pauldrons, horns, feelers, even hands and feet and all kinds of other stuff, all of which you can put on your characters. You can shape and size those items, put them literally anywhere you want and give your heroes a unique appearance. Naturally, gear isn't just for looks - on top of raising basic attributes like strength or dexterity or boosting your health, some items might greatly boost your attack speed, others come with a life drain and so forth. None of those special bonuses are groundbreaking or do anything you haven't seen in similar games, but that's because this tried and tested feature simply works. It's a ton of fun to watch your character attack at insane speed and regenerate health and power with each swing.

All of these features make Darkspore a good game, but some gaping flaws ultimately stop it from being really great. The biggest problem lies in the shallow character progression. Sure, they all have their own abilities and skills and unlocking more toons as you progress through the game is entertaining.
But each character only comes with two special attacks, a squad ability and a passive ability - that's it. There are no skill trees, no talent points and the only way to make heroes more powerful is by putting better gear on them. So while you may have a greater selection of characters at the higher levels, the actual gameplay never really changes, as you'll always be using the exact same kind of abilities over and over again.

Most other games will allow your character to control larger amounts of minions, cast more and more powerful and spectacular spells or grant you various special attacks, which can be chained into combos. On Darkspore, a higher level character might look cooler with bigger and better weapons and armor, but ultimately, he'll be using the exact same skills he had from level one. The numbers just get bigger each time you level up.

And repetition doesn't stop there. Where Diablo uses randomized dungeons, Darkspore will toss you into a series of seemingly random levels with varying landscapes like jungles, deserts and snowy mountains, which all look incredibly good. But as you play, these levels will begin to repeat over and over again. Monsters, bosses and treasure chests (pardon, 'obelisks') are completely random each time, but the layout and design of the maps will always be the same and once you've discovered them all, the game will lose a large portion of its excitement.

Another big problem is the console-like matchmaking system. At the beginning of each session, Darkspore will toss you into any random lobby, which contains up to 100 players, who will use the chat room in whichever language they prefer. You'll see a lot of French, German, Portuguese and a whole lot of stuff, which only appears as strange little squares rather than actual letters, because the European client cannot display it properly. Now try and team up with those guys! And you'll want to team up with them, because doing so results in extra loot and experience points.

There is an actual matchmaking button in the lobby, which attempts to group you up with people of an equal level to do dungeons with, but it rarely ever finds anyone for you to play with and you'll never know what language they'll end up speaking. Of course, Darkspore isn't the kind of game that requires a lot of verbal communication, but you're definitely not gonna meet any new friends on there!
It's generally a good idea to bring your friends to a mission. Basically, if you find yourself having to use matchmaking, you're fucked. Of course you won't care about any of this if you're just looking to play this game all by yourself, which is entirely possible. Just bear in mind that you'll be progressing at a much more modest pace.

Another thing that could have been great is the pvp. Sure, you do get to fight other squads in small 1vs1 and 2vs2 sessions. But wouldn't it be awesome to see 40 people on each team in massive, large-scale battles? We'll never know.

Darkspore could have been a fantastic game. I would have loved to create my own characters from scratch instead of getting pre-made guys. And giving those heroes a skill tree, however limited, would have added a lot to the longevity of the game, which instead has me using the same old skills from levels 1 to 200. The hand-crafted dungeons look incredible, but unlike random levels, they will get stale after a while. And the matchmaking and lobby system is just plain awful. Is it really asking too much to have players create their own sessions, which you may browse and join on the fly? After all, you're copying Diablo here, so you might as well take one of its most convenient features instead of replacing it with console-age crap.

But despite all those flaws, Darkspore is still highly entertaining. You'll want to keep going, unlock just one more hero, try out just one more squad combination, just try out that new laser cannon real quick and before you know it, the 20 minutes you've planned on putting into the game will have turned into several hours. Not getting any talent points or more powerful abilities to look forward to might put a dent in your motivation, but the insane amount of highly customizable items, the large roster of heroes and the brain-melting number of possibilities to set up your squads mostly makes up for the shallow, near non-existing character progression. And if you have friends to play Darkspore with, the game just gets that much better, as many heroes and their abilities only reach their full potential in multiplayer. And it's just fun to have a buddy hold a dozen monsters in place with mass levitation, so you can eradicate them all with a meteor strike. Good times!

And since they're selling the game on Origin for around 15 Euros, there's really nothing wrong with giving this one a try. Just don't get ripped off on Steam, as they currently charge you twice as much. Bastards.

-Cat