Introduction
I doubt there's anyone here who hasn't heard of Spore. It's been highly anticipated since it was announced as few years back, building hopes of something unique and refreshing. The premise is that you are the guiding hand of a creature throughout its evolution, from single cell to complex organism to space explorer.
Gameplay
Spore consists of several minigames which make up the whole, each one being similar in look and feel but reflecting the play style of whichever age your creature happens to be in.
The game starts at the cell stage, directly controlling your amoebic beastie in order to munch your way up the food chain. This stage is fairly brief and not too difficult.
Once you've evolved to a certain point you can grow legs and splosh your way up to the beach for stage two, the creature stage. Again, you directly control your beastie but this time in more of a World of Warcraft way, clicking around to move and selecting abilities to fight or befriend other creatures. As you charm or kill nests of other animals you get more points to fix on new bits to make you better at what you do, meeting progressively tougher critters as your nest migrates across the continent. This is the stage which allows you to craft your creature into the form you want.
Once you've mastered the beasts on your continent you have evolved a brain which is capable of utilising tools, and you move on to the tribal stage. This plays like a small RTS, guiding up to a dozen creatures. You gather resources (food) and either wage war on tribes of other creatures or befriend them using music or bribes. There are only three options for each strategy, and customisation is limited to costumes which slightly increase abilities in tactics. Once all the other tribes on your continent are subjected to your will (or extinct), you invent vehicles and pass to the civilisation stage.
The civilisation stage is RTS again, but a bit more in depth than the tribal stage. Controlling three different types of vehicles and building structures in your city to generate more income, you capture other cities (of your own race) until you conquer the planet. The vehicles and buildings are customisable, but the actual components have little effect. With the planet under your control, you craft your space ship and move to the final stage -space.
The space stage is huge compared to the other stages, and more in depth again. Directly controlling your ship (of your own design), you click around the various stars and planets making money to upgrade your ships and colonies. This is done by mining spice and trading it between yours and alien colonies. There's not a lot of variation in tactics here, as the aliens will dictate whether or not you can ally with them or have to fight them. Much of your time will be spent reacting to pirate/alien attacks and environmental disasters, although these can be minimised later with technology and defences.
Sights and Sounds
There's a nice cartoony theme running throughout the game, and a quirky sense of humour. There's nothing Crysis-gasp inducing here, but it all looks and sounds nice enough.
Stuff that sucks
None of the various mini games seem to have much substance up until the space stage. I get the impression that they were just tacked on as a nice little history to your space empire, and that the space stage was always supposed to be full game. Even the space stage itself is fairly limited in scope, and much of your time is spent reacting to hostile empires and emergencies.
Conclusion
Spore is quite fun and rather compelling. The space game which takes up so much of the experience is fast paced and moresome - you always want to trade that bit of stuff so you can buy another bit of stuff to terraform a planet and earn money for more stuff. If the game was a bit slower, had a bit more to do, and required less direct intervention in mundane tasks it would be a world beater. As it is, it's an interesting distraction.
Score :
Each and every one of them. I still tend to replay Populous 3 quite a lot.