Review: Spore strategy game

You’ve got to respect the creators of Spore for the scope of their ambition alone.

The game allows users to build their own unique creatures and take them on an astonishing evolutionary journey from the simplest of single-celled beings right up to a full-blown civilisation and, ultimately, domination of an entire galaxy.

Spore is divided into five distinct phases, with each phase representing a different rung on the evolutionary ladder. Each phase also consists of a slightly different gameplay style to the last. At first the objectives are extremely simple: swim around and eat lots of stuff, while avoiding anything bigger than yourself (which, initially, means avoiding everything).

Just when you’re getting used to life in the primordial soup, things shift to dry land and Spore becomes more like an action game, where the aim is to develop your creature’s primitive communication and combat skills. The next stage sees gameplay mutate into something approximating real-time strategy, as your creation develops into a tribal race.

Construction, resource-gathering and relations with neighbouring tribes become your major concerns at this point. The strategy aspect is refined in the subsequent Civilisation-like phase and, once you have conquered your own world and advanced enough technologically, the action shifts once again – this time into space, where players can explore new planets, get involved in cosmic battles and encounter a seemingly limitless supply of alien species.

Indeed, if you play Spore while connected to the internet, your unique homemade creations join potentially millions of other user-generated oddities, all of which can be shared among fellow players. The Spore Creator interfaces allow you to play at putting together all manner of wild and wacky creatures, vehicles and structures from basic building blocks. At times it’s like having a giant organic Lego kit at your fingertips.

Spore is never frantic or frustratingly hard, always colourful and manages to strike a good balance between familiarity and variety. It’s imaginative, amusing – even relaxing – and is sure to appeal to even the most casual of gamers.

That anyone even contemplated creating a gaming canvas so broad is, in itself, something of a marvel. The fact that Spore is also accessible, creative, educational and great fun to play makes it an essential purchase.