My Time at Portia vs Spore
My Time at Portia
My Time at Portia is a charming fantasy-themed adventure RPG that is set on a gorgeous, revitalized world after a post-apocalyptic event wiped out the previous technologically-advanced civilization. In this game, you play as an up-and-coming Builder, a respected role in society, whose sole purpose is to help solve the town's problems by engineering a solution.With a gameplay which may fondly remind you of games like Harvest Moon, My Time at Portia may be grindy in an RPG sort of way (think repeated dungeon runs or resource-harvesting), but the game has a nice relaxing pace, where its quests (both main and side quests) are slowly revealed as you progress. Being a Builder, you can also complete a commission request daily to collect some cash. The game also features an elaborate gifting/relationship-building system, fun ruin-diving areas, tons of interesting characters to meet, and challenging dungeons. You can even romance and eventually marry an NPC (not all though) you like!
The best part of the game is definitely its in-depth crafting system. There are tons of machines you can build to help you generate a wide variety of materials to build other stuff. You can also unlock new machine technologies via the Research Center.
My Time at Portia feels a lot like an adorable MMORPG minus the MMO part. It has the grind, the dungeon runs... but of course, this game places a lot more emphasis on its resource-collecting, as well as crafting and building aspects. Sounds like a game you'd like to play? Well, despite still being in early access, the first chapter of the game is already ready and bugs-free, so if you do buy the game, know that you can at least get a good 40 hours or so out of it.
Spore
Spore is a pretty unique and addictively fun god-mode-like sandbox game where you get to create a whole new world and fill it with your living creations. As a "god", you can play around with the game's five evolutionary stages, from Cell to Space, and grow an entire space-faring civilization from its very simple beginnings as a single-cell organism. Of course, to develop a civlization, you'll need plenty of tools to help them along and Spore gives all of that to you in an easy-to-use format. You can literally customize everything you like in the game ranging from vehicles that your creations will drive or even buildings that your organisms will live in.Although Spore is essentially a single player game - after all, there can only be one almighty god... and that's you! - the world you've created is shared with other players in the game, so your creations can actually explore new planets and maybe even bump into a hostile race which will force them to make the preparations needed to go to war.
Overall, Spore is an amazingly detailed, civilization-building, sandbox game that allows you to micromanange almost everything if you choose to do so, or you could lay down the groundwork and let things unfold by themselves. Best yet, there is no limit as to how many worlds you can create, so unleash your creativity and your godly powers and develop the ultimate civilization today!