Will Wright comes about as close to completing his vision as possible.
From a purely technical aspect, Spore is nothing special. The graphics are average, it's not a game PC fanatics will be showing off to try and make fun of console players for having an "inferior" piece of hardware. Having said that, the art design is unique and pleasing on the eye. It's very colorful and overall very friendly looking. The worlds look familiar to Earth but they're different at the same time. It's more like Earth on acid, it reminds me a lot of the ending in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The game is also pretty well optimized, and will run on most computers.
The soundtrack, while nothing fancy is perfect for this game. It just kind of goes on gently in the background, not asking for attention but simply providing you a soundtrack to create to. The sounds the individual creatures make are charming and cute. Overall the sound design is not going to blow your mind or make you go out and buy a copy of the soundtrack but it does the job it was created to do very well.
By now you may be asking yourself, "If Spore doesn't stand out in these things then why did it get such a high rating?". The answer is simple, it's because Spore is a game and creative tool, not the Sistine Chapel. It excels greatly at being very fun and allowing you to create on a scale not normally available. The creation aspect is incredibly deep and fun, you can now turn those doodles you drew on your geometry homework during high school into real computer generate beings. The creature creation tool is intuitive and very easy to use. Let someone who has never played the game before play around with the creature creator for ten minutes and you'll see that they will be able to create a creature that is much more detailed and interesting than the blob with eyes you were expecting them to make. There are also vehicle and building creation tools which are fun and interesting on their own, but for me they got old after a while and paled in comparison to the creature creator function. Each of the stages that your creature evolves through is very much and simple, but they really lack depth until the galaxy stage which actually probably has too much depth.
There are only three things this game could have done better, in which case I would have given it a 10/10. The first of which is the lack of depth on the tribal and civilization stages. There should have been many more unites to use, more options for what to do about your neighboring tribes and nations, and more consequences to what you do. My second issue is all of the irritating micro managing on the galactic stage. Now, there's nothing wrong with depth but when you have an empire the size of half the galaxy it's a little annoying flying your space ship all the way across said galaxy to defend one of your planets from space pirates or from a ecological breakdown. Once you're done fixing whatever the problem was you would get three other distress beacons from other planets you control scattered all over the galaxy. It can get stressful and it gets in the way of your main objective of finally reaching the center of the galaxy. My last issue with Spore, and by far the most important in my opinion, is that it does not matter what you do in the individual stages, because it does not carry over into the later stages. You don't keep your allies, enemies, trade routes, reputation, none of it. It makes it seem as if you had no impact on what happened.
Spore is an excellent and fun game that is easy to learn how to play. The creation tools alone are interesting enough to keep you busy for hours on end. If you're looking for a super in-depth strategy game then you will most likely be pretty disappointed with Spore. However, If you love using your imagination to create things or are just plain curious as to how a species you designed would make it through the stages of evolution then this is the game for you.