Darkspore Previews

A pair of hands-on Darkspore previews shed some more light on Maxis’ sci-fi action RPG, starting with this five-paragraph article on GameSpot:

The area we were placed in was called Cryos, a planet with floating ice fields over plasma. Before visiting any new planet, you’ll be able to check out what kind of non-player characters are going to be there and what kind of abilities they have. Each planet is vastly different from the others, so it’s crucial to see what you’re going up against and pick the best team to bring with you. We were able to play cooperatively with three other people and had our three creatures already picked out for us. Instead of playing through a game with just one hero, Darkspore focuses on a collection of heroes, so that you have plenty of variety and can create the best possible team before checking out a new planet. As we saw in our previous preview, the game will have five different creature types, each with its own resistances. Every hero that you play as will be unique, as you can customize it based on all the pickups you get as you progress through the game.

The controls are really easy, and if you are at all familiar with hack-and-slash PC games, then this should be a no-brainer. To move your creature, you left click anywhere on the ground and attack by pointing and clicking vigorously on an enemy. Numerical hotkeys are lined up for you to use your special abilities, which are unique to each creature. We played around with a stun attack, chain lightning, and a bubble shield, which came in handy when we faced the world’s boss. You have an ammunition bar that drains, so you can’t spam these abilities forever. Some of these abilities can only be used if all the members of your squad are alive, so it’s important to pay close attention to your health. Using the Q, W, E keys, you can quickly swap out members of your team when your health is running low–but be warned that some foes can use an ability that prevents you from switching. As you pick up healing items, your entire squad will heal together, so you’ll be as good as new in no time. There is a major focus on loot in Darkspore, so as you slash your way through, there will be plenty of items to pick up and catalysts to buff your heroes.

And then we move on to GamesRadar:

Down on the planet, we trekked alongside two other players so we had three heroes on screen at once, but we also could swap our heroes out for our individual squad members. You always only control one hero at a time, but you basically teleport one hero out and replace him at any time the only limitation is a cooldown. We tried out our buff brawler guy with powerful melee attacks, then swapped to our caster hero for some long-range bombardment and life-stealing abilities. Perhaps what was most fun was the agile hero that could teleport at will blinking all over the place and slashing up enemies with claws was a delight.

The game also takes another cue from Left 4 Dead besides its AI director: it has special enemies that immobilize one player, and the others have to come to their rescue. This, combined with hero abilities that provide passive buffs in an aura, along with various healing abilities, ensures that the game promotes cooperation. As a new player, the action frequently became confusing for us, and we had a hard time telling what was going on. We imagine that after some time that won’t be an issue we just needed to learn the visual cues to distinguish players and enemies.