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• Spore
• Reviewed on: 17-inch HP Pavilion DV7-1038CA notebook with 4 GB of memory, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.0 GHz, and NVIDIA's GeForce 9600M GT graphics chipset.
• Also available for: N/A
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• The Good: Great creature creation tools. DNA collection and analysis is an original and fun concept. The process of evolution is presented as five distinct games.
• The Bad: Most stages of evolution involve repetitive tasks and simple strategies. The civilization stage is a blatant (and woefully inferior) rip-off of Sid Meier's Civilization games. It's relatively short, with surprisingly little replay value.
• The Verdict: Will Wright's new game is an undeniably original and ambitious undertaking, but dull and repetitive play makes evolving your own species more frustrating than fun.
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Among the many pleasures derived from video games is this: The ability to simulate events not easily experienced in the real world. That was the great promise of Spore, a game designed to let players orchestrate the evolution of a sentient species, from single-cell organism through to galactic civilization.

Made by Maxis -- the software company headed up by Will Wright, legendary creator of the The Sims games -- Spore gives us godlike power to customize both the visual appearance and the abilities of our species. What's more, our creatures are regularly downloaded to Maxis' servers where they are randomly uploaded as wildlife in other players' worlds. So while your carefully crafted species might have dominated on its home planet, it will probably became fodder for extinction on countless others. This concept of creature creation and sharing is wonderfully innovative and wholly original in the world of games.

Move beyond the creature creation tools and community, however, and Spore begins to lose its appeal. The process of evolution is divided into five distinct stages, each of which is its own separate game. While this diversity of play sounds exciting in theory, I found most of these games to be too simple and repetitive to offer any real satisfaction.

Simple cells

The single-cell organism stage began with me steering a nondescript organism through a primordial soup with my mouse, trying to guide it into tiny bits of edible flora and fauna while avoiding larger predatory creatures.

Key to a cellular organism's survival, I quickly discovered, is DNA. It floats in the soup, and collecting pieces of it gave me the ability to augment my little swimmer with various defensive capabilities—such as an electrical charge—as well as experiment with different types of mouths, which determine whether creatures become herbivores, omnivores, or carnivores.

The action is rudimentary and arcade-like, but the cell stage is brief enough that the relatively repetitive task of swimming around looking for food never becomes too dull. Still, when the evolution progress bar at the bottom of my screen filled up, indicating that my creature had advanced as far as it could in this stage, I wasted no time in clicking my way through to the next phase of evolution.

Creature comfort

Before the second stage began, I was given the opportunity to evolve my creature into a landlubber. I gave it legs, feet, arms, and claws. I also affixed a better snout that had some sharp teeth— as a cellular organism I had taken it down a decidedly aggressive, carnivorous path and decided to stay the course.

As my gangly creation ran about the dry world he frequently met up with other species—and promptly devoured them, babies and all. I experimented with trying to gain the trust of my fellow animals by charming them with dances and trills, but it seemed too much of an effort for my naturally predatory creatures. Besides, evolution is, after all, about the survival of the fittest.

As the creature stage progressed I collected more DNA, which I used to add wings, hooves, and a variety of defensive shells and plating to my creatures. I eventually settled on a permanent design that made my species look rather like sumo wrestlers with shark-like heads and reptilian eyes.

I had just begun growing tired of the cyclic process of eating, collecting DNA, and evolving, when the stage's progress bar filled. Perfect timing, I thought, as I clicked through to the next phase. I was still excited about Spore at this point, but I was only a couple of hours in.

Tribal tribulations

It turns out that Spore's third stage of evolution is easily its worst. It's composed of two extraordinarily repetitive hours of collecting food, making babies, and meeting up with other tribes that the player must either ally with or destroy.

As an aggressive species, I found my creatures' best option was to attack opposing tribes. I'd send a group of warriors to raid a village, lose lots of them in the fighting, then twiddle my thumbs as I waited for the remaining few to harvest the food necessary to create and foster new tribe members. I repeated this tedious process maybe a dozen times before finally conquering all five enemy tribes.

The only real strategy came in selecting from the small collection of tools that I had stolen from other tribes the ones best suited for particular jobs—spears were good for hunting, torches were best for burning down huts.

Simply put, creativity was limited and the action was monotonous. I couldn't wait to reach the next stage of evolution.

Will Wright's Civilization I

The fourth stage, which began with my carefully cultivated species divided into nations vying with one another for global dominance, is perhaps the most disappointing in that it is a blatant—and woefully inferior—clone of Sid Meier's Civililzation games, which give players the ability to choose whether they want to use military, religious, or economic means to defeat opposing empires.

In Spore, if you want to rule the world through might, simply harvest a valuable mineral called spice, use it to create powerful armies, and then send them marching on enemy walls. Religious victory is similar, except that your fleets of vehicles are sacred and attack cities with a barrage of culture rather than shells. If you prefer to dominate through capitalism, simply create trade relationships with other cities and keep them up long enough to be given the option to purchase them. Regardless of which path you choose, it's a long, dull process.

That said, there is some fun to be had in this stage, and it comes via a set of fresh creator modules that allow players to design not creatures, but rather city structures and vehicles. I spent nearly two hours with this amazingly robust 3-D modelling software, carefully crafting apartment buildings, factories, tanks, and aircraft.

Sadly, I eventually learned that there was no tangible reward for my creative efforts. I could have succeeded just as easily by selecting buildings and vehicles from Maxis' collection of stock creations. What's worse, I wasn't even able to appreciate the finer details of my creations while playing, as most of the action in the civilization stage is best viewed from a very high perspective.

I conquered the world, but I was a bitter emperor.

Space: The final frontier

The space stage began, not surprisingly, with me building a space ship. Yet another wonderfully empowering creator tool allowed me to design a replica of the original U.S.S. Enterprise that was just about spot on (though I did take the liberty of placing an enormous cannon under the ship's saucer just in case I ran into any trouble).

Ship engineered, I took to the heavens. The goals in the space stage vary widely, ranging from claiming and terraforming empty worlds to setting up relationships with alien cultures to doing battle with an unpleasantly militaristic race known as the Grox. Plus, players are provided with dozens of fun and useful implements, such as abduction beams used to capture alien specimens, planet busters that wipe out offending globes Death Star-style, mind cleansers that can be used to control planetary populations, and cloud accumulators that come in handy in terraforming projects.

Simply put, the space stage is by far the deepest, most satisfying, and lengthiest phase of the game. In fact, it never really ends. You can achieve all of the objectives set to you and be dubbed "omnipotent," then continue to explore new worlds.

It was a pleasant enough conclusion to the game that it almost erased my memory of all the plodding and repetitive chores I had to work through to reach it. Almost.

Leave evolution to Mother Nature

It took about a day of fairly steady play for me to work my way from single cell to galactic ruler. That might sound short relative to most games, but Spore isn't the sort of game meant to be played once and then shelved. Maxis designed it with the intention that we would play over and over again, creating new creatures with different abilities and traits each time.

However, while I tried starting a second game—this time carefully selecting DNA that would lead my new species down the more peaceful path of an herbivore—I couldn't bring myself to continue past the creature stage. I had fun developing my species, but I dreaded the tedium of dealing with other tribes and cities, and I didn't want to repeat all of the space-based missions necessary to achieve galactic supremacy.

Put another way, so long as I was creating creatures, Spore was a blast. Everything else, including stage objectives and the strategies required to achieve them, felt rather like a nuisance.

I'm thankful that Spore provided the opportunity for me to simulate the process of evolution in my own little desktop lab. It's something I never imagined I'd be able to do. However, having now experienced the drudgery involved, I think that from now on I'd rather just admire the results of Mother Nature's handiwork than try to do her job.