This isn’t what you were expecting. I don’t know what you were expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. Spore, Will Wright’s true follow-up to The Sims, is a singularly strange game. It’s slick and messy by turns, as ambitious as it is compromised, as hardcore as it is casual. It’s both a tribute to gaming and the future of gaming. Most of all, it’s really bloody weird.

Yes, its essential promise is met: you evolve a creature from cell stage to sentience, to civilization and finally space-faring. Along the way, you’re designing and redesigning the beast, its world and eventually its universe. As expected, much of this takes the form of mini-games. Those two factors – the customization and the mini-games – are going to fix a certain image of Spore in people’s minds, and to some extent already have. It’s one of a game aimed at a casual audience, but blessed with perhaps the most powerful content-creation tool of all time. What that doesn’t encompass is how massive and complicated it eventually comes.

The mini-games aren’t initially convincing and two of the four are possibly outright failures, but once you hit the space stage, everything changes. It becomes a complete game, an enormous, elaborate epic of exploration and creation that encompasses and justifies elements of the prior, more finite stages whilst advancing you to an incredible new level of godhood, and creating a vast open universe you could potentially play in forever. It becomes Elite by way of The Sims, Carry’s Mod by way of Galactic Civilizations, an RPG, an RTS, a shmup, a management game, an offline MMO, a toy, a tool. It’s a masterpiece, but it’s also quite a mess.

It’s hard to fight off negativity during your initial hours with it. While each section is engaging, and each offers additional ways to customize your creatures – their nature as well as their appearance – the sense of disassociation is strong. Those first four stages are too self-contained, too separate from those that follow, and it starts to feel like it’s a notepad full of jotted-down short-story ideas rather than the hoped-for novel.

Spore falls down the most during its Tribal and Civilization stages, where you’ve already made your creatures but now you’re establishing their behavior and decor. Both are RTS variants, and both are a little tokenistiq; a matter of turning every rival tribe/civ on the map to your side via might or diplomacy. How you get there is fairly binary, and after the first time it’s a repetitious grind of resource-gathering and gradual expansion. Fortunately, you can start a new creature at any stage you so desire, so this stuff can be skipped.

Space Race

What they do achieve is to firstly accustom a newcomer gently to the space game’s key concepts of fighting diplomacy and economy, and secondly to remind you of how far you’ve come. When you’re in your (custom-designed) spaceship, cruising across the surface of planets in an instant, once in a while you’ll spot a little tribe of guys down there, picking fruit off bushes or dragging meat back to their crude huts. The area that they take two or three minutes to trudge across at that stage you can traverse in a split-second – but those little guys were you once. At the same time, yet dumber beasts roam and fight -ants to you now, stupid and meaningless, but again – that was you once, not able to do anything more than bite or chirrup. They’re going through the same motions you did, albeit not at the same artificially accelerated rate.

The jump between stages might be abrupt, but it’s not like what’s gone before is thrown out with every step up. It’s all still in there. Once you’ve amassed a library of your own creation and added in a few friends’ usernames, every one of those creatures, and their buildings and vehicles, will mean something. Spore becomes so big that it’s almost overwhelming.

Once you’re a few hours into the open-ended space campaign, you’ll have accrued enough cash (spice) and tools to redesign planets, to seed them with new life, to rapidly advance their existing species or to wipe ‘em all out and start again. The game finally reveals itself for what it really is – not so much a creature creator as a god simulator. A simple list of the things you can make and do at this stage would be longer than this review. Some of the things that you can do are basic, some of them are repetitious, some of them are even annoying – but most of them are wonderful, powerful, and personal.

The journey to that stage is tough though: cash is hard to come by, and disaster befalls your planets with exasperating frequency, requiring constant trips back and forth across the universe for repair jobs, which is hugely engaging but surprisingly intense.

It takes a fairly hardcore couple of days to reach Spore’s key prize: the opportunity to do anything and everything. It’s a prize more casual players, surely the game’s intended audience, will never reach, and for that reason alone it may be that Spore never wins anything like the commercial success that The Sims did. Regardless, it’s a wonder of a game. To make a long and whiny list of all Spore’s minor failing and broken promises would be easy, but for all that it’s a towering accomplishment of self-expression and scale.

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