Spore is a lousy game about evolution,
and a clever game about life out in the stars. The evolution comes first: You
build a creature from a single cell to a world-dominating species, tweaking its
DNA and adjusting its culture until you're commanding the spitting
hammer-tailed lizard thing of your dreams. The first four stages of the game
are short and disjointed, and as far as the science, Spore keeps ducking hard questions
by changing the subject. Anyone hoping to watch the survival of the fittest may
puzzle over the whole "singing and dancing" thing.
But these stages are really just a personality
test for stage five, where you launch into space—and into a real-time
strategy game that pits you against randomly generated galactic empires. The
skills you picked up on your home planet—diplomacy, militancy,
evangelical fervor—give you certain advantages as you decide whether to
work with or eviscerate your neighbors, but survival depends entirely on how
you use a few basic strategies. Meanwhile, you'll gawk over creatures created
by your fellow players, and you can also build your colonies with user-made
houses and factories. But none of the content offers game-changing advantages.
You can admire all the pretty slug-cows and their mushroom-shaped domiciles,
but they're mostly interesting for their own sake, not because they affect the
task at hand.