Creature Creator imitates Spore’s legendary monster maker, and it has Steam Workshop support

Remember Spore? That weird, yet delightfully zany Maxis title that oddly tapered off as you evolved your once glorious single-celled organism into something resembling an intergalactic empire? Well, if you find yourself yearning for its creature creator features, enter the aptly titled Creature Creator on Steam.

Creature Creator comes in as one of the only genuine attempts to replicate one of Spore‘s most beloved and acclaimed features: the creature creator. Look, Creature Creator makes absolutely no attempt to hide its inspiration. In fact, the game wears it on its proverbial sleeves, with a huge list of content and functionality having been built specifically to replicate Maxis’ old feature set in a somewhat modernized format. The final product? A whole game built around the creature creator. Is it worth playing? If you, like me, are a fan of Spore, then absolutely.

The Creature Creator lets you remake your old Spore monstrosities and share them with the world

Though some of its reviews question whether Creature Creator is still undergoing active development, the fact of the matter is that the game just received a shiny new update very recently. Its biggest draw is the addition of some fancy new creature customization options (i.e. body part shine, asymmetry, metallic properties, etc.) and improved support for the Steam Workshop, where you can share and download other players’ creatures to your heart’s content.

Circling back to my earlier thoughts about Spore, the game definitely fell apart after it left behind its creature-focused progression and gameplay mechanics. Developing a whole civilization just didn’t feel nearly as interesting and engaging as developing a single type of organism did, and Spore suffered for this mistake. Creature Creator thus attempts to focus just on that one particular lightning that Spore managed to capture back in the day, and it delivers precisely that.

Now, to be perfectly fair, I’d be hard-pressed to call Creature Creator an excellent game. It’s not that, not really, and its ‘Mixed’ review status is generally about what you’d expect out of one such project. Thing is, though, that Creature Creator is the single game that’s ever properly attempted to capitalize on the honestly ridiculous appeal that Spore‘s original Creature Creator feature had back in the day. Outside of this game, there’s precious little to look for elsewhere. With that in mind, if you’re about as nostalgic over Spore as I am, I do recommend Creature Creator. Not even for the gameplay, necessarily, but for the titular feature itself.

If you’re not all that nostalgic about Spore, though, there’s still merit in checking Creature Creator out. You do get to build and play as some seriously improbable genetic monstrosities, and – most importantly – the game is only $5 a pop, so it’s a minor investment at most. Not bad, right?