The problems creep in when you take a close look at what is going on. Spore is not a hardcore game of any sort – it’s even less sophisticated and replayable than The Sims in any of its versions. The cell stage is a matter of eating and fleeing. The creature phase is a biological arms race for war mongers and Simon Says for peacemakers. The tribe stage is the creature stage with weapons and the Civ stage is a very light RTS. Only the final stage has any staying power, and it is so distant from your origins that even the manual’s handy little charts don’t make it perfectly clear why your alien species grew up the way it did.

This is a little disconcerting since the links between the first three stages are pretty clear. Even though your six-legged sentient will be as similar to your original creature design as we humans are to prehistoric mammals, you have complete control over your “evolution” so there aren’t any surprises when your predator turns out to be very sneaky; after all, you made it that way. Then you hit the Civ stage and you turn out to be religious or military or economic, with few cues as to what leads in that direction.

There are only so many ways to play these early stages, though. It’s more fun to make creatures than vehicles or buildings, so this where most of your creativity will be spent, too. But if you’ve been a hawk and a dove, a carnivore and an herbivore, a sneaker and a runner, what’s left? Only the repetition and new creatures that get downloaded into your new world. So, if you like those early stages better than the endless FedEx quests of the space stage, you are a little bit out of luck.

Spore is too deep to be dismissed as just another toy, though. No, there is no real evolutionary model here. There are no ecological pressures. AI creatures will mostly leave you alone until the Tribe stage, but then they can’t really plan and attack. But knowing that there is a much stronger animal over the next hill brings out the zoologist in you. Will stealth help? A stronger charge? More feathers? Maybe just some body armor. Once you get to travel in packs, you find yourself seeking out the biggest and baddest beast on the block.

Much of the appeal is certainly the power of novelty and innovation. Though Spore cribs gameplay elements from a bunch of different genres, it is truly something new and original. The space game is the massively single player game that Will Wright promised, with some great terraforming fun thrown into the mix. Don’t be misled, though – this is not Black & White, innovation with nothing entertaining and exciting underneath. With Spore you can actually imagine the upside of the design tools, how they will make more customization possible. The attraction is the promise not just of infinite worlds to come in this game, but the infinite worlds around the corner if people start to pick up on what Wright is doing here.

If you want a deep strategy game, this is certainly not what you want to play. Spore is more diversion than obsession. And, given EA’s talent for milking a success story, the Ikea pack is probably only a few months away. It all comes down to the joy and delight of construction and testing your creative skills against everyone else who is playing. You don’t have to embrace everything that Spore is about to appreciate the possibilities that await us.

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