The best editing tools you've ever seen with mediocre implementation, but the Space stage alone is fantastic.
Spore is divided into five discrete stages that fit together in one giant evolutionary timeline. The Cell stage is a 21st Century remake of Pac-Man: gobbling food while watching out for predators, some of which are so large their eyes don't even fit on the screen. Munching your way through plants or protists (vegetarianism is at your discretion) you earn 'DNA points' which are then used to add elements to your cell, like ramming spikes or flagellae. Eat enough and you'll earn the ability to add legs to your creature, leaving the perils of the sea for open air and sunshine. Hooray!
Or at least, it should be good. The Cell stage is great fun for the whole hour it takes to complete, but once on land the fun quickly dries up like week-old primordial soup. In the Creature stage, interacting with other creatures allows you progress. You can befriend them with singing and dancing abilities, or chew them up and feed on their carcasses. Sounds great, right? What if I were to tell you that in the previous sentence, I just described the entire Creature phase? Walk up to a creature. Click the mouse a few times. You've earned some DNA. Walk up to another creature… that's it. That's the whole game. There is little in the way of exploration or depth, which is a wasted opportunity.
Luckily, the editing tools in Spore are so wonderful the game's many flaws pale in comparison. Using the creature creator, your options are nigh infinite. If you want your creature to be an eyeball on a stick, or a monkey that can still walk upright with its head up its own arse, so be it. Further on in the game new editors allow building, vehicle and spaceship creation. Suddenly my life has a new purpose: to recreate every Thunderbird in Spore's vehicle editor. The editors are so simple to use that your grandparents could operate them, yet powerful enough for intelligent designers to spend hours tweaking their creations.
Spore has been billed as a 'massively single-player online game' for the reason that as you play, the game downloads other players' creations into your game and vice versa. Better yet, you can maintain a Friends List or subscribe to Sporecasts of thematically similar creatures. This is one of the game's strongest assets and a feature that will ensure gamers will be playing Spore for years to come.
It is also in this feature that Spore offers perhaps the clearest evidence yet that God doesn't exist: if God was responsible for creating all living things, why did he make them so damn boring? I've seen everything from two-headed mountain trolls to inevitable giant penis monsters inhabiting my worlds. The best God could manage was the platypus, although those things are pretty hilarious.
Moving from Spore's Creature to Tribal stage, things don't improve much: I would say "poor-man's Age of Empires", but that's giving it too much credit. It is dull and needlessly repetitive. After befriending nearby tribes, the game moves to a Civilisation stage that is more of the same: whether seeking a military victory or religious, conquering enemy cities is a simple case of shooting something coloured at buildings and repeating ad infinitum until you have conquered the world. Don't get me wrong; your eight-year old siblings are going to be rapt with Spore's early stages, but anyone used to playing Civilization IV on Deity is not going to have a good time. Alternatively, if you have no idea what the previous sentence meant, you're going to love it.
As I fabricated my spaceship and prepared to blast off into the heavens, I had all but given up on Spore as the saviour of PC gaming. After five minutes of zooming around the cosmos it became apparent that all the rubbish stages that came before were a mere tutorial for the Space stage. Here, Spore changes into a genuinely epic game of trading, colonising and war with alien races. It's one of the most pleasant surprises a game has offered in years.
The size of the galaxy you can explore in Spore is so large, words barely do it justice. Leave your home planet and explore the surrounding solar system. Move further out and the solar systems fade into vast arrays of hundreds of stars. Further still, the stars gather into the arms of a huge cosmic spiral that surely no one could ever fully explore. In a way, that's what makes it so exciting.
When many of these planets and systems are packed with the creations of other players, suddenly Spore delivers on its promise. The variety of missions and rarities to discover is impressive, the sense of scale bordering on frightening. You can buy missiles that cleave planets in two, Death Star style. You can plant spice mines on every planet you reach and stamp your mark on space like an intergalactic Starbucks. It's absolutely bloody amazing to the extent where I want to take back all the mean things I said about the Tribal stage. It doesn't change the fact that the Tribal and Civilisation stages are monotonous, but it makes them a little more tolerable.
Taken individually the various stages of Spore are largely forgettable, but somehow they manage to coalesce into an impressive package. This is thanks to the greatest suite of editing tools known to man, an incredible last stage and a vibrant online community. While it's true to say that Spore is lacking in several aspects, as a tool for biological dicking around and a space faring romp it verges on genius. The future of gaming is here: not quite the way you expected it, but essential nevertheless.