My Spore review.

[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.

[Jaradu]

When the gameplay videos first started to come out for Spore, I was really looking forward to it. More so than any other game. However, as time went on the gameplay seemed to become simplified, the graphics replaced with bright, multicoloured, cute and quirky animals, and the survivalist dog-eat-dog tone of the game morphed into a slapstick comedy.

I was tempted to buy it anyway, just to find out if it had retained any of the original Spore-goodness, but after reading your review I definitely will not. Thanks for the review, Luvian.

And yeah, Securom sucks. It won't stop the pirates finding a way to crack the game, but will cause problems for a large number of innocent consumers. The sooner developers stop treating customers as potential pirates, the better.

[Luvian]

The game was leaked crack and all on the first of the month. I have to agree Securom doesn't stop piracy.

The pirates are sitting at home right now, happy in the knowledge they will be able to install and play Spore even in twenty years.

[Kyrvias]

More's the pity. When will they realise that it doesn't work? The world may never know.

Quite frankly, the creator was fun, but the rest of Spore is just as Luvian stated.

Edit: Said "quite frankly" twice in one sentence. Heh.

[Luvian]

The one part that disappointed me the most is that you can't even take the creatures you created with the creator and play as them.

Well you could if you started at the space age, but that's because you don't actually have creatures in the space age. You could just take the starting blob of flesh and just add a mouth to it, it wouldn't have any effect on gameplay.