not too good...
The game is broken into 5 parts, cell stage, creature stage, tribal stage, civilization stage, and space stage. The cell stage is a fun quirky minigame like stage where you really can't spend more than 10 minutes on, and my only complaint is that the electric power doesn't transfer into the creature stage. The creature stage is where you give your creation legs and have it hunt and do what animals do. Unfortunately, it is quite a dull stage, kill or befriend other creatures, and eat is basically what you do for an hour upwards. Of course you upgrade your creature blah,blah,blah, but it still isn't too much fun. The Tribal stage is when your creature gets arms and hands (if it already doesn't have them) and it is basically a small scale RTS where you use basic elements you learned in the last stage. The Civilization stage is my favorite stage, it is when your creature takes over the world as the dominant race and it is much like today, but you get to create your vehicles, and buildings and stuff and I always have a blast. Sadly, this is a quite short stage lasting from around 30minutes to an hour, and then you get the superweapon and unify the land and go into the Space stage. The Space stage is where a lot of the game's flaws seem to shine like lcd headlights. You go around meeting races, and trading and stuff, and the world is huge and open, but the big thing I have against this is that one time or another you are going to be threatened by another race and either waste most of your funds or be declared war on. And boy, it sucks because if you play aggressively through most of the game you are f-ed. When at war, it feels like you're powerless, go to invade, and they'll crush you when you may be lucky to have one other ship in your fleet. Then they'll storm your planets with a huge fleet and your planet won't do jack squat to help you fight them. Bleg.
In conclusion, I would not suggest purchasing this game, no matter what the hype, it is just a bunch of frustrating junk.