Occasionally, I find a game on Facebook that looks interesting, but I usually drifted after 3-5 days. Spore Island happens to be one of them. I like the idea of Spore, creating your own creatures and seeing them survive, but Spore Island really didn’t appeal to me past a few days.

Facebook games pretty much have the feel to them. Between the gameplay, there is that near constant drone of “bring more players into the game!” Some of them are a little better than others, while others are just terrible at it. Spore Islands goes one additional step. Most of the customizations in the game, you can never get unless you hand cold hard cash over to them. You use DNA points to “improve” your character. Well, not really improve. You can shift around scores to try getting a higher point value, but ultimately, there is no improvement in the game. Just shifting over time as supposedly your friends do the same. Because everyone likes to just beat on their friends endlessly. You can’t ever get more than 12 DNA (one every two hours) and most of the cosmetic benefits cost 15 DNA or more. So, if you want something nice, you have no choice but to pay for it.

There are very little benefits of friends. The game gives a higher chance of sparkles (bonus points) on the stage based on the number of friends, but those bonus points only dictate which of 12 options you have and the number of other creatures you can have. You can only put the secondary creatures on your friend’s island, so basically is just to get some minor bonuses to be better than your friends.

I can’t say there is really much I liked about the game. Creating monsters is fun, but they are so bland that you really don’t get an emotional attachment to them. And they change shape and size as you evolve them (just pushing points around), so it doesn’t really matter what you pick in the beginning, it will probably change.

Game play is pretty simple also. Click Observe, wait 120 second. Shift things around, rinse, lather, and repeat. Um… yah? In four hours, you can do it again!

There isn’t any gifting in the game, other than planting your creature on a friend’s island. Not exactly exciting and doesn’t encourage the social gaming that others do. I can easily see why Fluffy and my other friends pretty much dropped it after a few days.