Over the past few years, there has been a whole lot of hype about a game created by Will Wright, the maker of The Sims. This game was Spore. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. Well that’s what Wikipedia says, and yes, it is about that. As well as the big PC title, there was also a mini version, Spore Origins for mobile devices. This concentrates on just the first stage of the main game as a unicellular organism.

To start off, I played Spore Origins on the iPhone. The controls on this are very basic, using the accelerometer to control your little organism through the level on its objective to eat enough guppy creature things to collect enough DNA to move on. Most of the levels are this, except they start including unique creatures for you to attack or defend against. There are also special levels where you have to traverse a maze-like setting and your goal here is to get to the end without being killed by other creatures. This goes on for most of the 30 levels in the game, except for the 2 boss levels where you have to attack and kill huge creatures. This game is small, a little challenging at times but is worth checking out.

After getting to the end of that, I evolved onto the full PC title, Spore. At the start, it is much like the Spore Origins game, where you eat meat to grow and evolve. There is a fair bit more depth to the unicellular organism stage of Spore compared to its Origins counterpart. From here, you get to the stage where you grow legs and go onto land and either become friendly with another species or kill them. For me, this part of the game was the most interesting. It’s also where you get to customise your creature the most and turn it into your own unique creation.

Unfortunately for me, this is where the game all goes downhill for me. Then comes the Tribal stage where you either form friend a tribe, or again destroy them. Although the difference this time is that it is done in a RTS kinda way. The problem is it is not quite an RTS and is a bit weak. After this is the Civilisation stage. This is where it get completely ridiculous! It’s still the RTS type game but here you create the buildings yourself. that may be fun for some people, but I can’t be bothered with this. I couldn’t find any auto or random button so the game throws some random parts together to whip something up quickly in 5 seconds so I can get back to the actual game. Maybe I am missing something, but it’s still pretty annoying and ridiculous. I endured anyway and through the taking over of cities and silliness of creating building and vechiles.

From here, the game started getting better again, although not as good as the second stage of the game, in my opinion. Here you traverse through space, encountering other civilized planets. There are missions you have to do here to get through the game, and there are even missions to be done so you can form a good relationship with a civilization so you can form an alliance with them. Or you can annoy them and go to war with them, your choice. What you do through this stage, you collect badges for various objectives and such. This is by far the longest part of the game, and the rest of the game has literally been building up to this point.

To get a good feel of the game, you’d have to play it yourself, either by purchasing the game, or acquiring it by other methods. I did enjoy the game, but there was a lot I didn’t like about it. The game felt like a whole bunch of little mediocre games all thrown in a blender and released as some sort of huge game. For example, for anyone who has played a real RTS before, the RTS stages of this game will feel horrible to play and fairly weak. Although they definitely aren’t going for a full experience like you would from an actual game from that genre. This game is probably not going to give much to gamers, but for non-gamers or casual gamers, they might enjoy this a whole lot more because it offers a wide range of different things to do. This game was definitely not for me, but hey, it might just be the game for you.