EA Spore review

In Spore, you hold the fate of an entire species in your hands as it evolves from protozoa to an all-conquering galactic empire.

You begin life swimming around the primordial ooze looking for smaller microbes to devour. This adds to the library of body parts you can use to adapt your creature to survive in a hostile world.

Once you've left the tide pool, you gain body parts by befriending other creatures or driving them to extinction. You can design a lethal super-predator, construct a flying creature to avoid danger or develop social attributes to build friendships with others. Spore doesn't teach you much about evolution, but the cell and creature phases are great fun for kids.

The tribal stage is a simplistic real-time strategy game. Your hunter-gatherer society must ally with, or destroy, other tribes in order to take over the continent. This is the weakest part of Spore: there are limited options, but fortunately it's quite short.

With the advent of civilisation, you control an industrialised city state. Depending on your earlier actions, you'll start as a military, religious or economic society. The only currency is Spice, which is mined from volcanic vents. This funds the production of buildings and vehicles, which you can design yourself or select from a catalogue of creations.

Religious and military cultures must bombard enemy cities with propaganda or mortars respectively, while economic societies can simply buy out their rivals. This is more complex and satisfying than the tribal phase, although the sequence of mining Spice, building units and capturing cities is a little repetitive. Our final act as a planet-bound culture was to build a starship.

As your species spreads across the stars, you'll establish colonies and discover other intelligent civilisations. Diplomacy is the most effective tool in a universe full of creatures with laser weapons. With enough money and trade routes, you can buy entire star systems. You can undertake missions that range from averting ecological threats to obliterating empires. Later, you'll find valuable relics, terraforming tools that can sculpt planets to your whim and glimpses of a hostile alien race at the galaxy's heart.

The space phase doesn't involve particularly detailed resource management, but there's enough depth to keep you interested, sufficient plot to provide a sense of purpose, and freedom to explore the galaxy. Although the tribal and civilisation phases are a little weak, Spore has an epic quality that kept us playing. The creature and space stages have plenty of replay value and the creation tools provide scope for stunning designs. Part strategy game, part evolutionary simulation, Spore will satisfy casual gamers and keep strategy fans busy for a while, too.