From a basic, single cell organism, to a more complex being with a brain, passing through the tribal RTS stage, going through the civilization stage where you have to dominate your whole planet, and finally finding your way in space amongst thousands of different alien species and becoming the master of the galaxy, while giving the evolution of a wink on your way - welcome to the world of Spore.

Now don't think this will be easy, but Will Wright and his team of designers made sure that this process is in fact a lot easier than the actual evolution process.

While Spore delivers every promise that Will made when he presented this game, you will feel somehow empty and shallow after a few moments you start playing it, and unfortunately the feeling will never end.

But let's not be so pessimistic from the beginning, and let's admit the amazing accomplishments that Spore brings to today's gaming industry.  It succeeds in generating huge amounts of random content and distributes it smart enough to create a whole living and breathing world.

Every evolution era is completely different and unique, but your evolution and your decisions persist throughout the entire game, and shape your actions to come.

It all begins when a meteor of unknown origins impacts the surface a planet capable of sustaining life.  Of course you get to choose from several different looking planet environments, and then your meteor containing a single cell organism crashes onto the planet.

Cell

The game now looks more like "Feeding Frenzy"; you can choose to be a carnivore or herbivore, and then you have to start eating your way around until you get bigger and bigger.  As you navigate and feed, you find different power-ups that you can use to improve your abilities.  Equipping each of these power-ups requires DNA points that are also gained as you eat various things.  When you've got enough DNA points you can use the mating call button to find a suitable mate and evolve. 

The creature creator screen offers all the power-ups you found plus a few more options.  You can of course design the creature you always wanted, or import it from one of the existing models in the database.  The database contains thousands of creatures and it grows each day as the game exports user creations on the official Spore server and downloads them to your computer in order to populate your Spore world.

Of course, you can encounter the creature creator at any other state of the game, helping you design individuals, buildings, vehicles or space ships.  Your design and import options will grow as the game progresses.

Once you've seen everything you could have seen in the cellular world, and are big enough, you will be offered the possibility to grow legs.  This marks the beginning of the second era of the game.

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Creature

The next logical step after you've grown legs is to migrate on land.  Gameplay changes quite a bit here, and it turns now into a 3rd person mini RPG.  You can go herbivore or carnivore again, you can make friends with other tribes, or you can eat them to extinction.  Either path you choose, you will gain those DNA points once again.  Plus you can find more varied parts and gain special abilities like charge, speed, spit, charm, dance or sing, which can help you solve conflicts either aggressively or diplomatically.

In the third stage, similar to an RTS game and nicely started by the "Space Odyssey" theme song, you have the exact same objectives as in the previous era: to eliminate your opponents one way or another.

Tribe

You can control an army now and upgrade them with weapons or tools to impress the others and convince them to join your cause. You can construct buildings although you are limited to pre-defined ones and their location is already defined as well. The cool part is that you can "pimp your creature" more now, with tribal masks, ornaments, shields, pads, and other stuff. In fact, Maxis even recommends you to add hands to your creatures by the end of this period, as you won't be able to go back to some aspects.

Civ

Once the tribes know to fear your name, the game turns global, in a civ-like strategy including micro, macro and economy management. Your goal is once again to be the supreme ruler of the planet, by any means you see fit. You can establish trade routes and influence your enemies enough so the people will want your leadership; you can be a religious culture and have everyone converted to the true faith; or you can destroy everything that stands in your path by military means.

First you get to develop your City Hall, then build houses, entertainment centers and factories to increase production. Random geysers also provide income once you've established a mining operation over them. Of course, factories lower morale, and entertainment centers are there to raise it.

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The creature creator turns now into a more complex building and vehicle creator, while still offering the option to import one of the building designs from Sporepedia. There's even a flag and anthem creator available (which reminds me of a midi composer from a mobile phone).

Once you conquer another city, you will be offered the possibility to leave it with the same structure you found it: military, economic, or religious. This way, you can use all possible means to control the planet.

There are shortcuts, in the form of special abilities. For example, after conquering a certain number of cities by force, I was offered the ultimate bomb which obliterated the entire planet - thus offering me instant victory.

Spore in space

The final (and most exciting stage) in the evolution of your species is when you first inter-stellar travel begins. Having achieved world domination, it's finally time for those alien bastards to know your name! The final frontier is both fun and dangerous place, as the "eternal" randomness rules over the universe as well. There is absolutely no rule or reason why some species are just mean and evil and others are at your service no matter what you do. Playing on easy will lower the number of hostiles a bit however.

Maxis visibly paid more attention to this stage of gameplay, and for good reason: it's the most time you'll spend playing in Spore. Space is vast, but filled with events that add salt and pepper and almost give the game a background story. Almost. Would have been nice to have more of these in the other stages as well...

You get to explore planets, find long lost alien artifacts, fight inter-galactic wars, form alliances, abduct people in cool-looking self-designed UFOs, scan planets, and colonize or terraform new worlds.

And, of course, the twist: if you liked the game so much, you can always go back and play the other path: be diplomatic if you've won by force; or vice-versa.

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Some thoughts and a conclusion

While I admire Will Wright for his creations, and while he proves to have an ingenious mind and some fantastic game ideas, you will find that Spore lacks other, more classic things like a great epic story and a bit of feeling.

Everything is calculated, randomized, and can go forever in a perfect sandbox world. But do we want a game world to be as uneventful as real life? Sure, the God concept, creating life can have its satisfaction, but there are times you'll never get the creature you imagined no matter how powerful the creature editor is.

And then there's all the controversy flying around: Spore used to be a more "hard-core" game, designed for core gamers as opposed to Sims. But somehow, in the middle of the development process it switch to a cute game. Girl audience is growing these days, I know it; and part of the big success Sims had been because kids and girls liked it as much as ol' gamers. I understand this aspect from a marketing point of view. But... I don't know... you pronounce the final judgment.

Gameplay: 81

A really genius idea with average results. Still it's worth a lot and I really appreciate innovation. It really does change the way people look at computer games. Even if it did not turn out as the greatest game of all time, I would still encourage developers to create, not to copy. There are enough bad FPS and World of Warcraft clones in the world already! Oh and maybe, just maybe, your girlfriend will learn to play a bit better games all around, as she gets a basic training in each genre from Spore. More happiness in the family - yeehaayy!

Graphics: 79

Not bad, but the lack of... well any graphic option other than resolution doesn't make it shine. No anti aliasing support and it brings nothing new at all. I guess that's the compromise you have to make to be able to run on almost anything. With that in mind, it doesn't look bad at all...

Sound: 72

Basic sounds, odd subtle background music like in Sims, and some funny voices from time to time in the RTS eras. Nothing spectacular and it tends to get boring.

Multiplayer: N/A

No, except for the fact it downloads content form the online Sporepedia database, and the game becomes more and more varied as it gets more user-designed content. There are already more species designed than the number of species which exist on planet Earth so...

Hardware: 85

Without using anything fancy or next-gen, Maxis has done everything possible to make this game run on every platform, and we'll probably see ports soon. There are already versions for I-Phone and DS but of course they use a slightly different engine. I almost have no doubts we'll see Spore on every console known to men real soon.