I ADMIT I was excited when I was handed a copy of Spore to review.
After all, the game was developed by Maxis, the maker of my all-time favourite game, The Sims.
My expectations were high - but Spore lived up to them.
In this game, you control the evolution of an organism from its humble beginnings as a single cell until it grows to become a complex space explorer.
Your in-game persona begins as pond scum. You get to choose whether it becomes a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore during feeds.
Feeding gives your organism evolution points that you can use to make it grow. You can add physical attributes to give it different abilities.
For example, you can give it fins to swim better or spikes to protect it against predators. And when it is sufficiently evolved, your 'cell' can progress to the Creature stage of the game.
At this stage, your creature will begin interacting with others around it, in either a friendly or hostile manner. This stage involves playing simple games or launching repetitive attacks which can get somewhat tedious.
The next stage is the Tribal stage, where you focus on gathering food, which is used to support your tribe. Players can either choose to ally with neighbouring tribes or defeat them.
'Playing nice' involves performing an instrument whenever the tribal members ask you to. Hostility involves gearing up your tribe with ammunition to crush the enemy.
Each tribe conquered adds a head to your tribe's totem pole, contributing towards your advancement toward the Civilisation stage.
In this stage, players focus on dominating entire cities, either by force or simply by buying them. The goal here is to overwhelm the enemy by continuously generating 'units' - whether economic, religious or military.
Players will eventually graduate to the Space stage, unquestionably the largest and most open-ended part of the game.
Now your creature can begin exploring the galaxy and even establish colonies on other planets to expand its territory. It is even possible to alter the characteristics of the planets themselves.
Play god
Your creature can wage inter-galactic space wars or obliterate entire species of space creatures. In short, the Space stage allows you to play god.
What is great about Spore is the vast amount of user-generated content available online. It is not unlike the Sims universe, where fans set up sites with custom content for others to download and import to their own games.
Even though it is relatively new, the amount of content that has been generated online is astounding and is unquestionable evidence that this game is likely to be a runaway success.
Playing it is an absolute delight, whether for those new to real-time strategy games or even for more experienced gamers.
Spore is available on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms.
RATING: *****
This article first appeared in The New Paper on Sep 20, 2008.
