Darkspore: Online Dungeon Crawl

Intro
If you bought or eventually end up buying a digital copy of the game online like I did, be sure to check out the online manual here. Personally, it helped me pick up some cool hero-editing tricks. Also be sure to refer to my screenshots if you haven't already.


Game Overview
Darkspore can be a bit confusing/overwhelming to a new player. For instance, at first you're rewarded for opening every obelisk you see. But when it comes to the 'boss area', if you open the obelisks they only contain health and power capsules and will count against you when calculating your medal results after the mission. There is a distinct difference between these obelisks though, the regular obelisks are blue and health obelisks are green (see pic below). However, this color difference didn't mean anything to me in the first few levels of the game, one of them gave me loot and catalysts and the other gave me health and power capsules. It simply made sense to open all of them, unless of course you knew about the objective log (shortcut 'O') that early in the game.

^Bad (Unless you're dying)  Good^

You, the player, are the Crogenitor and you gain experience and levels by killing, slaying and obliterating all Darkspore in your path. In order to do this though, you must first 'edit' your heroes with the appropriate gear and more importantly, looks (or is it the other way around?). Each hero is one of five types, bio, cyber, necro, plasma, or quantum; sadly, the only real importance your heroes types have is that Darkspore deal 100% more damage to heroes of the same type. Your heroes on the other hand deal the same amount of damage to every type. In addition, each hero is one of 3 'classes': the sentinel, the tank type whose primary stat is strength, the ravager, melee fighter type whose ability damage is dexterity based and lastly, the tempest, the mind-focused caster type. With these heroes you are tasked to form squads, squads consist of 3 heroes that can be used interchangeably throughout each threat, as long as they're alive. If you or one of your party members does happen to lose a hero, they can be resurrected by picking up a 'resurrection capsule' dropped from any random Darkspore. It resembles an empty capsule surrounded by a whitish glow and unlike other capsules, it must be clicked on to be used.

The game's only currency is 'DNA', which can be obtained as a drop from mobs in the form of a strand or in exchange for selling equipment to the DNA converter (the store). DNA is used to purchase upgrades such as higher stat caps for your heroes, increased inventory size, unlocking catalyst slots and more. This can all be done in the Arsenal by opening your inventory ('I') and clicking the 'Upgrades' tab in the DNA converter.

PvP
Unfortunately there isn't much to PvP in Darkspore. It's 2v2 on a small arena-sized map, where you and your partner's three heroes of choice are pitted against your randomly selected opponents. I guess the upside is that there is any PvP at all. Unless you have a friend you can team up with, you're going to be paired up with a random partner, that is, if you have the patience to sit in matchmaking long enough to find one.

Tips
- If you ever get lost, the trails of blood are a decent indicator of where you've already been and pressing 'N' on your keyboard will bring up an arrow on your mini-map that will help lead you to the end of each level (and make sure you don't miss any objectives along the way)
- The key to a successful squad is versatility, vary your hero types and classes in order to prepare for any special enemies you may run into
- Having a hero with a healing squad ability like Meditron or Tork in your squads is extremely helpful
- Get link bonuses from your catalysts by linking the same colors horizontally, vertically or diagonally
- Party up when you can, the experience bonuses are significant
- Beginners, check out this great beginners FAQ

Pros
- It's an online dungeon crawl with 25 different heroes (100 total, but 4 variants of each hero), attractive level designs, one of a kind skills & abilities, co-op gameplay and of course, awesome loot
- The 'chaining' of threats, completing consecutive levels for greater rewards
- Customization of heroes is impressive, you can easily spend hours making your hero look as awesome or as goofy as you want
- Being able to use not just 1, but 3 different heroes in the form of a squad
    - Each hero having their own squad ability that can be used by any
      member
- For those who enjoy having a stat sheet to look at, Darkspore keeps track of some basic stats as shown below

62240 = 17 hours, 17 min & 20 sec

Cons
- Matchmaking system is virtually worthless (see suggestions below)
- With 100 available heroes it'd be nice if I could have more than 3 squads with only 9 of them
- Poor design of teleports to boss areas (at ends of levels) can cause you to lose valuable loot

Careful, once you enter the red bubble there's no going
 back

- Can't equip new loot as you get it, this can only be done in the editor
- Can't change the camera angle (in game)
- Can't 'alt + tab' out of full-screen mode and get back into the game
- The same level designs are recycled over and over

Other Thoughts/Suggestions
- The stat for time played is in seconds (obviously not a problem.. but.. ?)
- The narrator and the uninteresting story practically begged me to turn off my speakers so that I could at least try to enjoy the game
- Instead of using the heroes I wanted to use, I constantly found myself using the heroes that I had the best weapons for at the time.
- Any player-to-player trade or auction house system would do wonders for this game
- The matchmaking queue would be 1000x more effective if players could do anything other than wait at the matchmaking screen for 1 minute before it timed out. Allow players to edit their heroes/squads and even solo campaign while they're in queue for a group.

Bugs
- Mobs with the self-resurrect buff are very buggy, they only resurrect half of the time, and some of times they do they're invisible for some time and then they disappear
- If you use Skar's 'Shadow Cloak' (invisibility) ability during a horde encounter where a mutation agent is present, the agent will simultaneously turn all the surrounding enemies into elites
- See pics

Says the upgrade is available when it should
 give the insufficient dna message seen below

The correct version (and yes it was purely coincidence that
my party members at the time just happened to be talking
about the game's bugs as I was documenting one)

Score - 73
The brilliance of the spore editor and the unique idea of squads aren't quite enough to counteract the seemingly endless stream of bugs that plague Darkspore.