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Spore: You can be a winner in the game of life!

• By Andrew Dagley
• September 04, 2008 12:54 PM PST
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Evolution Revolution

From there, you hit the tribal phase, the first of the last three stages of Spore development. These latter stages take a rather decidedly different tack from the earlier epochs of evolution. You're quickly shuttled away from basic evolutionary tasks like deciding which type of arm might be most beneficial to slightly more complicated game mechanics that clearly have their roots in real-time-strategy games. In the tribal and civ stages, the objective is not to survive and evolve but to take over the world--literally. You start out in a region and must first bring that under your control using one of several different means: you can pursue diplomacy, war, or in the civilization stage, economic or religious methods. Then it's on to conquer the rest of the world and bring it under your influence.

Step out of the primordial ooze and start sculpting your creature's final design before heading into the Tribal and Civ phase.

Unfortunately both of these later stages seemed fairly lightweight to me. Without the creature evolution system that was present throughout the earlier stages, both the tribal and civilization phases felt like a barebones RTS game that was tacked on at the last minute. You are afforded the ability to still meddle with nature through simple tasks like designing vehicles and buildings, but on the whole, these activities lacked the depth and fun that's found in the more complex creature creator. Thankfully, the tribal and civilization phases are relatively brief'the typical player will probably get through both in about three or four hours.

The Final Frontier

So what's a species to do after leaving behind its primitive beginnings and working its way up the food chain until they've conquered the world? Head out into space, of course. The space phase, which constitutes the end game, is where the real meat of Spore lies; once you've become the sole rule of your home planet, you roam the galaxy in a single vessel--you can either design your own or use a premade one by either Maxis or other players--with little in the way of preset goals. You are encouraged to do certain things, such as taking on missions that require you to eliminate alien planets, plant colonies, and fetch individual species from far away planets but these are all optional.

The space phase is the one that truly encapsulates the sandbox style of gameplay that was highly touted in most of the Spore previews. Missions are almost unnecessary and really only serve to fill your coffers for things like repairing ships and adding new parts. There's also a lot of content here as getting to the center of the large Spore galaxy will probably take weeks: there are literally thousands upon thousands of solar systems that lie between your home planet and the center and exploring them all can take a long time.

Space, the final frontier: deck out your ships and go explore the universe at large. Who knows what you'll find out there?

The galaxy that awaits you is truly massive and will take a loooong time to fully explore.

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