In Spore you start out as a single-cellular organism in a primordial state. By eating and breeding you slowly evolve into a sentient being, be it as a carnivore or as a herbivore. Each time you produce offspring the game lets you enchance your creation with different features. Features that you earn by collection DNA points achieved by accomplishments you’ve made. The very powerful 3D editor gives you full control of evolution giving you almost endless options of upgrades and physical attributes. The different stages of development your creatures go through are called phases;

tide pool phase - Video

The Tide Pool Phase, or the ‘cell phase’, is the very first phase in the game where you will be a small single celled creature. Your goal here is to eat other creatures to gain new abilities, evolve, and survive onto the next level.

creature phase - Video

After the Tide Pool Phase, comes the Creature Phase. Here, your creature will not be a single celled organism anymore, and can possibly become quite large. In this phase you will be given the choice to move onto land or stay into water.

tribal phase - Video

Here you will not only control one creature but a whole tribe of them. Many new elements of Spore will be introduced during this phase. For example, you’ll be able to build tiny villages, improve the way of their live, and form your creatures’ culture as it advances through the Tribal Phase.

civilization phase - Video

It is now time to go out explore and conquer the world. Good relations with neighboring cities can be made, and wars can be started. This phase is all about the interaction between creatures.

space phase - Video

Now that you’ve conquered the entire world, what is better to do than start conquering the universe? Here, you will be able colonize on different planets. Terraforming the planets to produce an atmosphere will be necessary to live on the planet. This is the last stage in the game, and perhaps will take hours of playing time to get to.

Not only can you control the appearance of your creatures, you also have full control of the your buildings, enviroment and even planets. Most things can be molded in your fashion; vehicles, landscapes, cities, space crafts.

In the end you’ll have to master a fully fledged society with all that it comes with; wars, exploration and ultimately the final frontier, space. Obducting alien life forms, warring with neighbouring stars, terraforming entire planets and spreading your civilization are among the many cool things that can be done in Spore.

Spore can be explained as mix between Civilization, a drop of SimCity, some The Sims and a big dose of Will Wright creativity. This quick sum-up only touches the surface, for more info visit the features section.