So after almost a full week of playing while away from school. I have done a whole lot to be done. And I'll have to say this game is addicting as I said before. But eventually I will also have to add in the fact that I find it to be quite repeditive. Seriously...

I have been working on one planet, the planet that I have tried two species; to whome I have found the better one. And so from there I quicky progressed to higher formes of life. My civilizations grew, and I augmented thouse I aquired through economic means; so that in the end my cities would be perfect with the most income possible with great productivity. This was probably the most fun the game threw at me, I am a huge fan of the civilization faze. It was the most interetaing, as well as the perfect time span it took place it. I cannot stress this enough... I would play this over and over again if I had a choice.

And so after totaly owning this stage with my giant economic nation, I pressed on to the space age, where I would hopefully disperse, and settle around the universe. This is when the game gets annoying and boring as hell...

We start with the most annyoing tutorial that has exsisted in a long time, and even if you skip it your still required to do the full missions tied to it. This alone takes a good time to do, and when its done your shoved out into space to wonder around aimlessly at first, with a very small amount of cash in your pocket. This causes another big problem. Money, its very hard to earn in your early stages, making expasion extremely long and.. well boring. You spend hours upon hours of zipping your way between planet and planet trading spices... very simple, but time consuming. This brings me to another point.

Its very hard to take another planet, or destroy an empire. Serously... even on easy mode its hard. You have pretty much two ways of taking planets from another, and thats War, and Economy. War is virtually impossable, seeing you have a fleet of about three ship from allies that work with you trying to take out a planet littered with plantetery defence turrets and fleets of enemy ships tracking you down. All this while they launch attacks on your own planet (oh yeah, and your the only war ship in your empire, so you have to fly all over to save their sorry butts.). Its gets really anoying really fast. So whats another way to take the planet. Well buy them out! Simple yes? Well it is... sort of. It takes several things to do this, first you have to establish a trade route with the other planet. But to do this you have to be a liked ally (makes sence). But it takes a very... very... very... long time till you can buy the planet. Probably a few hours for each, and you can only have about four trade routes running at a single time. Making this process take forever! Now comes the next difficult part of this, the cost of the planet. It will cost you over a million to buy the planet. A million that is very hard to make. Oh, and let us not forget if your offer for the planet is turned down.. you have to start that trade route all over again, yes the bar resets and you have to wait all over.

So in the long run, is spore worth it? Yes, yes it is. It is one of the most complex and educational games to have been put out ever. The amount of science that goes into this game is crazy. It is by all means worth it. I just would like to see some changes made on the space age. Simple little changes that would make the game perfect, at least to my standerd anyway.

1.) Give me a further travel range between planets. It would be so nice to be able to fly from another galaxy to another when I'm having an eco disaster. Hyperspace would be awesome.

2.) Give my scroll wheel a break, and let me communicate with planets without having to zoom in to the solor system itself. I would like to chat with them from simply being on the dot representing the solor system.

3.) Allow me to buy a fleet of my own capital ship, not just take allied ships with me. This should not even have to be mentioned... serously, what is this?

4.) Give me a better map! I would love to pull up a full map of the local galaxy with the names of all the solor systems down. A quick reference guide. Even if it was only for discovered planet, this would be very helpful for missions.

5.) Stop making the missions so confusing. I don't really bother with them anymore because finding some of these places is a challenge on its own.

6.) Make my city turrets acutally work, I'm sick of having a planet with five shield defences calling out to me to come save their buts. And when I get there I never see a single shot being fired from them.

That is my list, fix this and I would be so happy with this game. Yeah space age may seem like Escape Velocity, but its lacking some of the things that made EV so fun, and this boring.

I will say one thing though, in the end this game is fun. The overall idea is unbeatable. A new idea that was never done before, and something quite unique on its own. I give it two thumbs up for tackeling the eveolutionary theory, and doing a very, very good job at it. Don't be detoured by the space age alone, I would still buy this game!

-Takahashi