Darkspore Preview

GameDynamo has kicked out a brief preview of Darkspore based on what we know about EA and Maxis’ sci-fi action RPG thus far. A couple of paragraphs:

Darkspore’s science fiction story revolves around a group of alien heroes who must stop a dark corruption from taking over the universe – an evil form of DNA that has a bad habit of corrupting any creature it comes in contact with, transforming the otherwise friendly creature into a malevolent Darkspore monster. The dark story and setting permeates into the visual design of the game as well. Darkspore sports semi-cel shaded characters in dark and dangerous settings, stark with shadows and accompanied by neon-style color palette in which bright, saturated colors stand out amongst dark blues and greys. The top down camera may take away from Darkspore’s foreboding atmosphere, but the choice is a sound one when considering that Darkspore is all about strategy, especially in regards to unit and enemy placement.

Throughout your planetary adventure you’ll befriend various heroes like the warrior-class Goliath, the mage-class Sage, and Meditron, the healer. Each character sports a unique design and specific abilities, ranging from a reptilian behemoth equipped with an energy sword to a tarantula that can sap the souls of the living. Darkspore abandons Spore’s creature creator in favor of a vast equipment customization system. As you defeat enemies, you’ll collect various pieces of armor, ranging from chest and shoulder plates to helmets that can be interactively placed onto your characters. With hundreds of equipment items and twenty-five unique characters to collect, each with four variants, it will be almost impossible to have exactly the same hero as any other player online in either cooperative or player versus player modes.