*** Please take note that this review goes in detail about the game itself, most especially at the end, so if you haven't played the game yet, I suggest you look away now. ***

Everyone should know what Spore is by now, but to the unlucky one who hasn't even heard of Spore, this is a game that lets you create your own creatures and seeing it evolve through five stages as well as designing buildings and vehicles for your own cities. That's the basis of the game and while it was a brilliant idea and the game is very creative, there are several flaws which sadly bring the game down. That doesn't mean it's a bad game, however. This is a game any computer gamer should have a look at, most especially the Creature Creator.

Graphics:

While many games today have high-quality graphics, the graphics in Spore aren't top notch and they don't have to be. Although the graphics are equivalent to a 2004 game such as World of Warcraft, for what Spore is, it has the right graphic quality since making them more like what other games are right now would take away the charm of this game.

Controls:

There's nothing unusual about the controls compared to other computer games and there's nothing wrong with it either. The only real issues with the controls that come to mind are the difficulty of manoeuvring around in the Cell stage and entering/leaving planets and systems in the Space stage.

For the Cell stage problem, if your cell creature doesn't have the right parts as well as the current pushing it to a certain direction, you're going to have problems moving around. This is of course bad and a tad frustrating when there's a bigger cell creature swiftly swimming to your direction and killing your creature within seconds.

The problem with the Space stage is how you have to keep scrolling or holding down Home/End key to enter or leave a planet or system when it should be much simpler by entering/leaving instantly as soon as you command your spaceship to go. Despite those two minor but still annoying issues, the controls are still good.

Sound:

The sound in this game is very good. The sound effects are well done and the voices of the creatures are brilliant. The voices of the creatures depend on the type of mouth they have and it works well. In addition, there are voices for baby forms of creatures, which add a cuteness factor to them, but sometimes, it's hard to help but think they sound like a squeaky toy for a pet dog.

The music is also worth mentioning. The ambient music you hear in the game gives out a great feel to the objectives in Spore. The most notable track in this game has to be the one on the main menu, which is the sort of track you'd have in mind if you were in space. So overall, great sound production.

Gameplay:

Creature/Building/Vehicle Creator - Designing your own creatures is what everyone will think of whenever they think of Spore. The ability to create your own creatures, buildings and vehicles is amazing. For creatures, you can either make up something completely weird or make it based off something you like (e.g. your favourite Pokemon). This is a lot of fun and you may end up making lots of creatures and they don't have to be made for the main game. You could show off your creations to your friends or the world wide web by uploading videos and pictures.

There are four types of buildings used in Spore, which are city hall, houses, entertainment and factory. The city hall is the main building of each colony, entertainment buildings are to make the citizens happier and the factories are to produce items, spice and such, but decrease the happiness in the city, so you have to place the type of buildings correctly in each city of yours.

For the building designs, you're given a nice variety of parts to use for the buildings, but you can only design the outside of buildings and never get involved with the inside of them, so it's not as detailed as The Sims where you design the whole of your house with the base, the furniture, whoever lives there and such. Even so, the ability to design your own buildings for your species is still very nice.

The Vehicle Creator is another great feature in this game. You can design land, sea, air vehicles and even spaceships. Again, there's a good variety of parts to use for the vehicles and it's rather easy to design them, unlike LittleBigPlanet where you have to build your own vehicles from scratch, but can be designed in any shape or form as desired. How the land, sea and air vehicles are designed only matter in the Civilization stage and afterwards aren't that important. For the spaceship, it doesn't matter what parts it's given since there are no Health/Speed benefits at all, so the player is free to design their spaceship at their own will.

Cell/Creature/Tribal/Civilization/Spac e stages - The Cell stage is the start of the main game where you are a small creature hunting for food to get bigger, but along with that, there are bigger cell creatures out to get you. However, as you get bigger, they appear smaller, making you say "Who's the tough guy now, Vinnie?" to the ones who tormented your own creature. Apart from the manoeuvring issue, the only other problem with this stage is how short it is. This stage can easily be finished within half an hour, or possibly less than that. This stage is interesting overall, but could have been longer.

The Creature stage is one of the best two stages out of the five. Here, you control your own creature around the place befriending or killing other species you come across. The choice to like or hate the creatures is up to you, but some creatures may insist on attacking you when nearby. This stage is rather short if you advance to the Tribal stage as soon as possible, but there's still the opportunity to explore the whole place, which is interesting to see which creatures by who appear and most of all, the creatures that appear in epic form to kill everything in its path.

The main issue with the Creature stage is the lack of ability to view the whole map. Without seeing the whole map of the place, it can be difficult to know where you're going and which creatures are located where. The ability to view the full map would have made it much easier to navigate around the stage, but sadly, the Creature stage doesn't support this. Still, it's worth playing this stage to see which creatures you come across, whether it be something Maxis made or one of the friends you added to your list.

The Tribal and Civilization stages are also short with one basic objective, which is to befriend/destroy other tribes and take over the world. These stages should have had more added to them, especially when the Space stage has many things to do, while these two stages are very short. However, they are still part of the playing creature's evolution process, so it's necessary to have them here.

And last but not least, the Space stage. This is the longest stage out of them all and will take several hours to complete, but it's a lot of fun. There's a variety of things to do in this stage such as becoming allies with other empires, forming new colonies in other planets, destroying an empire, carrying out missions for any empires and reaching the centre of the galaxy. You'll start off small, but as the stage progresses, you can purchase stronger weapons, planet atmosphere tools and the ability to go through wormholes located throughout the place.

As this is the Space stage, you are able to explore the whole galaxy and discover literally thousands of planets (apparently, there's over 50,000 solar systems in this game). This is a wonderful idea, but as you play the stage, you'll feel visiting each and every planet in galaxy is overkill. Luckily, this isn't necessary to do, so you're not having to spend weeks exploring every single planet. However, the amount of star systems could have been halved to make it less ridiculous to find things. While there's the ability to go through wormholes, isn't exactly the greatest idea considering you have no idea where it takes you until you go through it. It would be much better if it said where the wormhole takes the spaceship to rather than finding out yourself.

The other big issue with the Space stage is that there's no real ending to the game. One could argue that getting to the centre of the galaxy and defeating the whole Grox empire is the end of the game, while someone else could say you haven't finished it until you've unlocked all the achievements. If you defeat the Grox empire, you're not rewarded with anything special for that and in order to beat them, you need to attack every single colony of theirs and there's hundreds of them surrounding the centre of the galaxy. Trying to defeat every single planet run by the Grox takes hours to do and it's very tedious.

This is a letdown since having to upgrade to the most powerful weapons obtainable and having to travel from star to star to star while getting brutally attacked by the Grox empire to reach to the centre of the galaxy seems to be all for nothing, especially when you're rewarded with just a special terraforming item, which isn't much at that point, unless you intend to continue the game.

A true ending would have felt more satisfying. Just seeing a short cutscene showing your creatures celebrating would have been good enough to inform you that you've reached the ending of the game, but can continue doing stuff afterwards just like in Pokemon. The endings may have not been much, but you know the main goal was to beat the Pokemon League and have the freedom to do any other tasks afterwards. If Spore had an ending like that, it would have been more satisfying.

Besides the aforementioned problems, the Space stage is still a lot of fun and worth trying.

Overall rating: 7.7/10 - This game has tons of potential, but sadly, didn't quite meet the expectations to what it should have been. It's still a good game, but has a few too many flaws, which is a shame. However, I found this game to be much more interesting than The Sims. I was never too keen on The Sims, but Spore grabbed my interest very well. If you haven't played it yet, this game is worth having a look, most especially the Creature Creator.