What if you were given the chance to play god to a race of little creatures of your own design? Would you raise them to be a peaceful, loving race? Or maybe they'd be an industrious species that knows how to produce to better their lives. Of course, there's also the option to create a race that would like nothing more than to see all other races completely eliminated from the primordial ooze, world, and galaxy. Spore gives you that opportunity, and while playing the role of a controlling deity with more than one finger in the mixing pot is fun, it has a lot of stumbles along the way.

Let's start at the beginning. Literally: the game begins in the protozoan stage, where you control but a single-celled organism. You can upgrade it's abilities by eating other cells (animal or plant, depending on your mouth), to gain DNA points to eventually evolve. The game proceeds much like this: achieve goals to earn points to reach a point of evolution. It takes you through the single-celled stage, through to animal intelligence, to tribal interaction, civilization-building, and eventually the exploration of space.

There's no real transition between any of the segments beyond pressing an 'evolve!' button, which is a bit of a letdown, since it merely feels like you're jumping from one game style to another, without anything really connecting the two. Even the idea of customizing your creature is dropped: after the tribal stage, you can still design buildings and eventually your space ship, but it's all cosmetic. It has a lot less of a point to it than before, when adding more flagellum meant going faster, or putting on better legs meant being able to jump or sprint. The customization ability of the game, arguably its best feature, just disappears.

That's not to say that there isn't anything to do. Well, the space-faring stage has things to do, other stages merely have you trying to take over your opponents in any way possible. Generally this means either winning them over with peace, religion, or money, or simply exterminating them. How you go about your task of becoming the alpha race determines various bonuses you get to use that assist you in doing like-minded tasks. Destroy civilizations, and you might get bonuses in attack power in the space stage, for example. All this, however, feels rather pointless, since you're just repeating the same actions over and over again; the AI isn't good enough to play well during these modes and there's no real strategy, just sending out units over and over and over again.

Everything culminates in the space stage, however, when you're finally given free reign (so to speak) of the galaxy, allowing you to explore as far as your fuel limit will allow, before requiring re-filling. This is the part of the game where things can get really, really frustrating. You're thrown into the galaxy, bright-eyed and weary, with one planet under your name. At first, you have little technology and money, so you have to harvest spice from other planets (by colonizing them) and sell them to those who want them so that you can buy better technology, get further, and - one of the main goals in the game - eventually reach the center of the galaxy.

There's a lot to do at this point. Explore worlds, colonize them, pick up creatures and plants and terraform planets to your liking, trade, make peace (or war), upgrade your ship, you get the idea. It's the most involving of all the stages of Spore, and arguably makes it feel like the previous stages are just tutorials for this. It's enjoyable.

Until you get attacked. Repeatedly. Rival races love to attack you in Spore. They adore it. Unfortunately, they do it a lot, and there's not much you can do, especially when you first start the space stage, since they've already expanded and got lots of cash while you, well, don't. The worst part about it is that while you can build turrets on your colonies to protect them, chances are they aren't going to do a whole lot. This means that every distress call from every colony that's attacked has to be responded by you personally, sending your ship back from whatever corner of the galaxy it's currently exploring. It's a pain because it happens so often, and there's not a lot you can do about it.

The graphics in Spore are not terribly impressive, but they're not really supposed to be. What is impressive is the ability to create any sort of creature, be it a snake-type thing or a beast with ten legs and four arms, and have the game figure out how it moves, talks, dances, and hold a spear. A lot of the game's fun comes just from creating a menagerie of creatures to populate your worlds with, as well as downloading the designs of other creators around the world.

Spore is an ambitious idea, taking 'god games' to the extreme and having you go from protozoan cells to space-faring creatures in one game. Unfortunately, this type of scope has consequences. What the game comes off feeling like is less like on big, epic game and more like five smaller games crammed together uncomfortably. None of them, except maybe the space stage, are fleshed out to a sufficient degree, and so they end up feeling half-done. The fact that creature customization goes out the window once you pass a certain threshold doesn't really help either. The problem is that instead of being one big game, Spore just ends up being five smaller ones. And these smaller games just don't live up to the promise that an all-encompassing god-game could deliver.