A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away there was a man called Will Wright, and he made a game called the Sims, and then its sequel, and then all the horrendous technicolour yawn of expansion packs that you'll see packing the 'desperate last chance bargain bin' in your local games store. Fortunately for us he had a dream, and that dream was to stop rehashing the Sims, preferably sometime before our eyes bled black and our civilization disappeared under piles of brightly-toned DVD cases. He also dreamed of making a game that would simulate everything in the universe ever, in beautiful, shiny detail. After numerous false starts and quite a long wait Spore is, kinda, maybe, that game.

   In all honesty, there is something quite inspiring about Spore. It's truly vast in scope, starting with the very first opening menu screen which shows the huge spiral of the galaxy swinging into view, complete with a handful of planets that offer themselves to you as the home of your soon-to-be-created race of beasties. It starts you off as a tiny single-celled micro-organism floating in a tide pool and takes you, by stages, through life as part of a pack of creatures recently emerged from the primordial ooze, then as the overseer of a tribe, then to a global civilization and finally into space to explore the galaxy and its mysteries, and to play practical jokes on other sentient beings with less imagination or fewer legs than you.

Spore scores

   Some of this progress is pretty fascinating. The cell stage is a nice fun mini-game even if it won't exactly knock you for six, and the creature stage is excellent fun, largely because of the amount of customisation and adaptation you can put your creature through. It's like a version of the Sims where everyone is ugly and you can eat the people you don't get along with. The attraction of making strange and goggle-eyed quadropeds with claws for ears and xylophones for claws (ok, I exaggerate) and then stampeding round some alien savanna is surprisingly long-lasting.

   The space stage, too, is actually very enjoyable as a game in itself. Pitched into a galaxy of interstellar empires, you play as the captain of a plucky spaceship sent out by your homeworld to convert the infidels, buy them out, or burn their pitiful colonies to the ground, depending on how you fared as a global civilization. You can zip happily around the place, trading or looting as you please, locating ancient artifacts, terraforming planets, setting up colonies or helping your freakish alien neighbours. There is a plot of sorts, if you want to pursue it, which sends you off hopping through wormholes (which are the only way you can actually cross the vast Spore universe at any kind of speed) to uncover some secret at the very centre of the galaxy. I won't spoil it for you, but when you get there all it does is play you a YouTube clip of the ending from The Usual Suspects*.

   The game's parts mesh together well for the final stage, allowing you to create any sort of planet you want by letting you set the planet's atmosphere and temperature to create verdant forests or blasted magma pools. You can also set up ecosystems to fix the climate in place and pave the way for your own colonies, or just graffiti the place with mountains, valleys, new colour schemes and whatnot. In fact, as most of you will have already guessed, Spore isn't so much a game as a do-whatever-the-hell-you-like simulator.

*Not actually true.

Spore draws

Spore wars

   The problem is that to bring in such vast scope to the Spore galaxy Maxis made it extremely repetitive. Terraforming and colonising new planets, though pretty and rather cute in Spore's fine graphics set-up, follows almost exactly the same process every time. As does interstellar diplomacy, spice trading, and the gritty business of warmongering. The game's combat system takes some advantage of the pleasant mechanics of piloting your spaceship in a planet's atmosphere before crippling the experience by swarming you (and you are the only person in your entire empire who can attack other planets, or mount any kind of defense) with enemy defense ships, laser turrets and waves of sheer bloody-mindedness. By the time you reach the space stage your race appears to have lost all inclination to defend itself, whether from miniscule but belligerent empires or puny space pirates: woe betide you if you decide to pursue a war on two fronts. Your empire's citizens are only too happy to inform you (in an unflattering hybrid of what I can only assume to be High Botswanan and the secret dialect of the mentally impaired) that they are under attack from idiots/pirates, that some chunk of their ecosystem is about to go dodoesque or that their mayor has lost a toenail, and they reliably do so every five minutes.

   This should be, in all fairness, a minor quibble. Spore is quite happy for you to leave your empire in the lurch if you so wish while your go paint a planet to look like the head of Richard Gere. But it nonetheless makes galactic war frustrating rather than fun. Conquest is repetitive, just as defending your planets from conquest is. Most of your time you will spend scrolling your mouse wheel in and out as fast as you can just to make the most of the quiet before your empire of babyish layabouts brandishes their incompetence at you by faster-than-light radio again.

Spore flaws

   Unfortunately, if the best of Spore's stages are in their own way a work of flawed genius, its worst are merely pedestrian. The civilization and tribal stages play like half-hearted RTS games, and the interesting and wide-reaching customisation that the creature stage offers is tuned down to become window dressing of a rather uninspired sort. The tribal stage could have been something genuinely new and interesting, but a lack of detail and depth makes it an inconvenience you will mostly want to hurry through in order to get into space.

   The civilization stage, by contrast, was probably something of a dud from the start. It's been done so much better so many times before by Sid Meier and friends, that it doesn't really justify its place in the game at all. Too long to be a fun mini-game, too simplistic to be interesting, the civilization phase squats on the Spore timeline like an ugly cousin. But once again Spore manages to turn what in other games would be a major irritation into a reflection of its own successes: Spore's open-ended approach means you never feel like you have to play through it more than once.

   And if anything is going to divide opinion about Spore, it's the Spore ethos of allowing you to pretty much do what you like. There's no storyline to push you through whatever gameplay hoops the designers might have invented, but equally there isn't always a huge amount of direction involved. This mostly means that in the better stages you have fun, and in the weaker ones you don't, but it also leaves the whole exercise without the satisfaction of any kind of completeness. This means that hardcore gamers will find it an unsatisfying buy, as will genuinely creative people, who will want more from Spore's 'creator' apps than they can give. In other words, Spore too often falls between two stools.

Spore bores?

   Well, no. Most of my criticism isn't so much directed at blackening Spore's reputation as it is trying to find out why this game isn't the masterpiece it clearly could have been. It has a lot going for it: a well-thought-out graphics engine that can still pull some admiring gasps when it needs to - its depiction of outer space can be almost as awe-inspiring as the first Homeworld, my personal benchmark for space-based beauty. It also can boast a good bit of content, a dash of humour and a lot of freedom for a creatively-minded player. But in order to woo the more casual players it seems as though Maxis have sacrificed the opportunity to give the game depth and, ultimately, longevity. Make no bones about it, Spore is a good game. But it is only good, not great, not excellent, and even though you'll want to do a lot with it at first, you'll probably only replay it now and again. If there isn't much on TV. Maybe.

       ... Meirion Jordan