Electronic Arts Spore review

This eagerly awaited game from the mind of Will Wright, creator of The Sims, lets your imagination run wild as you populate the galaxy with weird and wonderful creatures and guide them towards the stars.

It's described as a massively single-player game, because your creations are transferred to the online Sporepedia, from which they can populate other players' galaxies.

When you begin life as a water-based micro-organism, your concerns are simple: eating other creatures, breeding, and using the Creator to add new parts to assist your survival. Despite offering only two tasks to concentrate on, this initial part of the game is surprisingly entertaining, and indeed it's already the basis of a spin-off title.

Sprouting legs moves you onto land, where interaction with other creatures extends to imitating their behaviour. Success forms alliances, but depends on parts scavenged from skeletons and added through further breeding. (Spore doesn't exactly stick to the textbooks when it comes to natural selection.) The move to 3D makes the Creature Creator far more interesting, with additional parts on offer and the ability to manipulate your spine to change posture and gait. Each generation can be wildly different from the last.

In the later stages, the Creator is repurposed to make clothes, buildings and vehicles. The process remains a great deal of fun, even though these accessories lack the lively appeal of the creatures themselves, and despite some small issues with camera control.

The 'friend or foe' strategy aspect carries through to the tribal, civilisation and space stages. Tribes are impressed by musical instruments and gifts, while territory is acquired by force or religious conversion. Food acquisition also gives way to the economics of spice mining to fund your expansion, and befriending other space empires means performing missions on their behalf, so long as they aren't at odds with your own sensibilities. Essentially, variations on a few themes provide a steady and enjoyable learning curve.

Same species, different day

Unfortunately, the templated feel of the game begins to pall on repeated runs. First time through, the sprinkling of humour serves as a distraction. The giant holographic preachers are sure to raise a laugh, and strange phenomena in space encourage further exploration. You have the freedom to steer towards war or peace at any point. But you'll increasingly notice cracks in the veneer through which the lack of variety begins to show. The Creature Creator remains the most enticing portion of the game.

We hope the inevitable future expansion packs will add more than just spare parts. Spore really needs more variety, whether in the form of additional interactions, new foliage, or more diverse missions in the space stage. As it stands, the gameplay doesn't quite do justice to the beautifully implemented creative elements.