So Spore has been in development since 2000 and hyping itself up for the last three years. It's really quite a letdown.
First, lets get this straight, this is not a game that charts the rise of a civilisation from cell to interstellar empire, it is a space game and a poor one at that, it's not Privateer or X Beyond The Frontier.
The much flaunted first 4 stages are little more than the customisation options at the beginning of any RPG, only a long and overly drawn out version. Each epoch sets a different characteristic, and in the second epoch you can design your creature and in the third and fourth dress them, and that's the crux of this game, it's really just an RPG.
The first epoch is fun the first time, being a cell, bobbing about, and the differentiation of sizes in organisms is a nice touch. But it is over quickly and lacks any real depth, it would just be a mini-game in any other title, but it has the RPG element that is basically leveling up.
Then you have the creature stage, where you put legs on your cell and have your own personal abomination against God wander round and commit genocide. Your goal is to earn enough DNA (experience points) to level up your creature, as well as find new pieces just lying around.
This part of the game is like an RPG with the fun taken out, basically you find other creatures to kill or impress an arbitrary number of. Occasionally your herd migrants and you have to have to follow them, but that's all there basically is.
Then when your creature's brain develops enough, you can go to the tribal stage and your decisions boil down to either violent, peaceful or capitalist, with 3 choices seemingly being the trend in this game.
Though, you're still being effected by your cell stage choices. This can lead to the fun possibility of predatory herbivores. The rest of the decisions you made for your creatures and who they allied with and who they warred with become null and void, as those choices are wiped away, just as in the cell stage. Though, some physical traits like wings make slight changes, they won't win you the game.
Okay, so here instead of one creature you control a group of them, rather than other tribes of your own species. Several other species have similarly climbed the out of the primordial soup and become tribal as well (with populations breeding at rates only plausible in the Bible).
Anyway, with control of a tribe, you do what any self respecting chieftain would do... set about committing genocide or cultural subjugation, since only your species will remain when you advance to the next stage.
Tribal is probably the easiest stage, you either equip your tribe with musical instruments and impress the other tribes, equip your tribe with weapons and wipe out all of the other tribes or harvest food like mad and buy them out.
Then after this brief section of game play, it's off to the Civ stage, but if you're expecting something akin to the actual Civ games or any game similar to Civ, then you'll be sorely disappointed.
This is the first epoch where a previous decision really effects how everything else goes from here. Basically, there are 3 choices: Military, Religious or Economic and you can build land, sea and air units for each type of Civ.`
Economic Civs can buy opposing cities, Religious Civs can convert opposing cites and Military Civs can conquer opposing cities. There is only one tech that can be unlocked and that air units and you unlock that by conquering half of all cities, you have access to everything else is unlocked from the start of the stage. This is in many ways just a repeat of the tribal stage and is over nearly as quickly.
These four sections of the game flaunted selling points, but actually take no more than a few hours to complete.
Now, we have the space stage, which is essentially an RPG that has some weak story, but I must be honest, I only played an hour or so of the space stage before finally taking the game back and getting a refund.
The game has some nice bits and designing creatures, buildings and vehicles is fun, but they're interspersed with too much grinding and not enough actual game play.
On the evolution front, it fails to surpass Maxis' Sim Life, and on the game play front you'll be let down if you're not looking for a really cheap knock-off RPG.
