Product Reviews

The latest game from Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, asks you to guide the biological and cultural evolution of an organism from primitive pond life through to galactic empire. It places extensive control of creatures, buildings and vehicles in your hands, along with a guiding role in the development of a society.

Life starts in a tidal pool viewed from a top-down perspective, where your only concerns are foraging for algae or feasting on other creatures. You're given the choice of diet - playing as a carnivore stirs the survival instinct of herbivores, who squeal and flee from your presence. Whichever choice you make, there's no safety from other predators. Choosing the right body parts through evolution is key to survival.

Mating with another of your species takes you to the creator where you can add eyes, spines to fend off attacks and flagella to swiftly evade predators. Tokens collected after skirmishes add other abilities such as poisonous parts. The evolutionary theme is explored to a bigger extent with many more parts in the creature stage, after which the focus shifts to creating clothing, buildings and vehicles.

Parts are dragged to reposition them and deformed by tugging on arrows attached to their axes. It only takes a few minutes to come up with good results, but you'll get wrapped up in perfecting the look and applying your own colour scheme. A multi-button mouse is recommended, as it gives control over the camera and the scaling of individual parts by moving the scroll wheel. Large creations exhibit minor issues with restricted building room and camera angles, but mostly it's a joy to resize vertebrae and contort spines before watching your bizarre creations spring to life.

Attach legs and head for dry land and a new gameplay element becomes as vital as finding food: your relationship with other creatures. As a small animal, you can adopt a social or combat stance that demonstrates

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your intentions. Successfully killing an opponent or forming a new alliance pushes the bar at the bottom of the screen closer towards the next stage of evolution, when an ally will be able to tag along.

Other creatures will sing, dance, charm and pose their way into your affections, but you'll only worm your way into theirs with enough band members and the right body parts to sufficiently imitate their moves. This basic structure is adapted throughout the remainder of the game, switching to music instruments and later using judgment to determine whether species will respond favourably to bribes or performing missions on its behalf. Alternatively, you can try wiping out opponents, requiring the additional skill of knowing when to withdraw and replenish energy.

At first, the landscape offers scope for exploration. On the current MacBook, graphical detail is minimal but adequate, and at least Macs with shared graphics aren't locked out of the experience. On our top-spec Mac, small forests and flower-field meadows looked beautiful, although scant topography was tiring after a while.

As you evolve, traces of your past are visible in wild creatures and scenery. When you finally reach out into the heavens, the scale of Spore's galaxy becomes evident, even daunting. The previous desire to see what lies over the next hill is replaced with a need to know what's in the next solar system and exploration comes to the fore again. Breeding and food supplies become a distant memory, replaced instead with simplified economics of colonisation, mining spice and establishing trade routes.

With so many worlds, it's unavoidable that planets begin to look much like one another. They become reminiscent of 1960s Star Trek, where familiar boulders and foliage were unconvincingly disguised with different colour palettes. Unfortunately, the same issue plagues the gameplay, and missions feel like they're dressed up in just slightly different clothing. Curiosity will carry you for a while, but Spore's longevity is stifled by repetition.

Its real hook lies in the various creation tools, not least because you can share with friends and strangers through the Sporepedia that allows players' imaginations to cross-pollinate galaxies. For those wearying of The Sims, Spore's creators offer richer expression. It seems inevitable that expansion packs will add more parts to them. We also live in hope that they'll add new types of planet and a variety of missions to liven up the final and by far the longest phase of the game.