[Luvian]

Cell Phase:
Eat things smaller than you while avoiding things bigger than you. Do this until you fill your evolution bar and move on to the next mode. There are 12 possible parts to play with in this phase, and all around it should take you about 15 minutes to get through it.

Creature Phase:
There is no exploration, no real interaction and it doesn't feel like a real world. All the creatures are gathered in their little nest and they never leave it. The only gameplay is going around every nests and either singing to them of killing 3 to 5 members of their species until the game has decided you have done it enough.

There is no point in getting stealth, flight or other such survival skills because there are no predators seeing as all species stays at their next and you can simply avoid dangerous nests. Also, your nest has an infinite number of respawning creatures and there is no death penalty. There is nothing else happening in this phase. You can either sing to or attack rival nests, there is nothing to interact with.

Also, this is the phase in which you unlock parts for your creature. You have to unlock these parts every games if you want to use them, and they are given to your randomly so you can not sinply create the creature you want and just have fun with it. You will complete this phase before you have found all the parts. This is also the only phase in which you can modify your creature.

Tribal Phase:
There are five tribes. You have to either sing to them twice or destroy their hut. There is no other interactions. There is nothing else to do, nothing to interact with. This phase last a whole 20 minutes and once you've played through it once you've seen everything there is to see. Also in this phase you start using tools and clothing so most of your creature's innate stats are ignored. Your customization and parts don't matter anymore.

City Phase:
You are up against 8 cities. You have 3 types of units. Your interactions with other cities are limited to destroying them, buying them out or converting them. No diplomacy, no other interactions. Repetitive. From this point onward you do not control your creature anymore, it has no stats and it is unimportant to the game.

Space Phase:
You are never alone in space. There are tons of other alien empires. Everywhere. You start with one planet. They have infinite waves of multiple spaceships, you have only one spaceship to which you can later on add 1-4 additional fighters after much grinding.

You can theoretically upgrade your ship as well as terraform planets, but to get these upgrades and tools you have to spend hours grinding through the same 5 mini-quests repeated over and over while getting raided every 10 minutes or so by pirates and other civilizations. As if this was not enough you also have to constantly go back to your planets and cull creatures so as to prevent your ecosystem from collapsing.

This was supposed to be a sandbox phase but the amount of harassment you're receiving, the extremely high prices of one-time use terraforming resources, the even more ridiculous price of parts as well as all the grinding you have to do to unlock all those things totally remove any freedom from this phase.

Overall:
The game feels like five uncompleted minigames tacked to each others as an engine demo. There is no actual substance or lasting value. It is shallow and disappointing and there is more fun to be had with the standalone creature creator.

Oh! Also you only get to install the game 3 times. You didn't really bought it you see. You rented it a full retail price.