Some parts are weaker then others, but as a whole Spores awesome.
Cell Stage was fun in a Pac-manish sort of way.
Creature Stage I liked, though they could've added more activities to do.
As it currently plays out you roam the land - attack other creatures and eat said creatures or make friends with said creatures. Occasionally you'll be interuppted and told to migrate which has you moving from one nest to the next.
It can last a fairly long time if you want to roam the land and unlock extra parts to put on your creature before you advance to the tribal stage and become incapable of further morphing your creature.
I wasn't a big fan of the Tribal stage, though it wasn't BAD.
I'm just not all too terrific with RTS games.
You gather food from plants or nearby animals which is the currency for EVERYTHING you do in this stage.
Apparently you make buildings out of food. Yeah. A bit odd.
You can then choose to destroy the opposing tribes with tools such as stone axes or make friends with instruments like maraca's. Making friends has the advantage of having someone from their tribe occasionally drop some food off for you, so you could probably get away with taking a tribe member or two off food gathering, but they don't seem to help you if you're attacked which kind of sucks.
As you make friends or destroy dudes you get the weapons and instruments they used to further improve your ability to either kill dudes or make friends - you also gain an extra tribe member that you can recruit to make you kill dudes or make friends faster.
Civilization Stage I kind of rushed through.
I was disapointed with it, kind of.
I read in previews that the inspiration for this stage was the Civ games so I was all like HELLS YEAH, A TURNED BASED STRATEGY... It's not Turned Based. It's probably closer to Rise of Nations rather then Civilization.
It's just more RTS - replace your tribe members with vehicles you create, food gathering with spice gathering and crappy huts with buildings you create - I s'pose you could create more crappy huts if you really wanted too.
Theres three ways to go about taking over the globe.
Send over your hotdog shaped tanks or whatever and blow them to hell.
Send over some sort of religious propaganda vehicle and wait for them to like.. Convert, I guess.
And Economic, which I haven't explored at all but I assume ends with you buying them out.
Space Stage is where i kind of opens up and becomes incredibly awesome.
I don't know what game to compare it too.
Galactic Civ? One of those 4X games I've never played.
Theres quite a lot to do.
If you get to the center of the universe theres an ending here, but I've yet to do that.
You meet and befriend other races created by fellow players, or blow them to hell.
You can colonize planets which often requires you to terraform it and make it inhabitable as to maximize your Spice gathering, so you can sell said Spice and make some MAJOR SPORE BUCKS.
You can use said MAJOR SPORE BUCKS to buy various upgrades which make befriending, terraforming and blowing stuff up easier. The galaxy IS HUGE. I'm not sure how big, but Will Wrights claims that it'd take 70 years or something to fully explore seem pretty plausible, but so long as it continues to teem with new content it would not be a dull ride.
Your enjoyment of Spore will most likely come from how much you enjoy either creating things or seeing what comes out of other peoples warped minds. I for one am very much into this. I love exploring. I like creating.
And because of that I love Spore. I know I made it sound kind of medicore up until the Space Stage, I don't mean too. The other phases have their moments - they're just either not long enough, don't have enough to do in them, aren't based on a genre that appeals to me or sometimes a mixture of the three - but as a whole the game is marvelous and easy to recommend and it's kind of sad that Spores getting such a bad deal in many corners of the gaming community. A lot of folk are complaining that it's not "Sim" enough. That it's too "casual", "simple" whatever, though I've never seen anything in the years prior to Spores release that it'd be anything BUT simple or casual.
