Cell stage

After the intro to the game you are presented with a small number of stars you can click on to create a new creature.  Each planet looks different from the next, so it is important to choose whichever planet you like the look of the best.  I try to stick to planets that are less dark colored, sometimes it is difficult to see at night on a dark planet. 

Right away, the customization begins by asking you to name your home planet.  You can type in any name you would like or use the random name generator, which is provided for anything you need to name.  Once you have settled on a name for your planet it's time to start evolving!

After a small cut scene, you appear as a new single cell amoeba that needs to eat.  Now, initially you start out with a beak that eats meat, but later on, you can change the mouthpiece to one that eats plants or both.  The more food you eat the bigger you become.  Along the way, as you get bigger and bigger, you can choose to evolve by mating with another creature of your kind.

When you click the glowing button in the lower middle part of your screen, you are taken to the creature creator where the real customization begins.  I am not going to go into detail about the creature creator; everyone knows how extensive it is.  However, as you play the game in both cell and creature stages, you collect shining badges that unlock different parts that you can use to create your creature.

At first, you do not have many choices for your creature's appearance.  You get a few different tentacles for movement speed, some different eyeballs, a few weapons, a jet similar to a jellyfish, and three different mouthpieces.  Don't get me wrong, it is still amazingly customizable, but the real customization does not come until you get on land.

The next step is to name your creature, paint it in any fashion you like, and then save your new little friend so that it can continue on the path of evolution.  Depending on whether you have chosen the mouthpiece that eats meat, plants, or both you must continue assisting your creature with gathering food.  The mouthpiece that can eat meat also serves as a weapon so that you can ram into other creatures to kill and eat them.  Don't worry though, if a bigger creature kills you, you will just respawn as if it never happened.

There is a hidden sliding bar keeping track of the amount of meat and plants that you consume during this stage.  The reason for this is to determine whether your creature will be a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore.  Obviously, the more meat that you eat the more the sliding bar will move to carnivore and vice versa for herbivore.  In my opinion, it is a good idea to try to balance the two so that you end up as an omnivore because sometimes it is difficult to get a kill in order to eat.  On the flipside, you do not want to be completely dependent upon plants and end up on the lower end of the food chain.

Something to keep in mind is that there is a hidden bar watching your aggressiveness in every stage of until the space stage.  You are given special abilities based on your actions in each state.  For instance, in one game I was a carnivore, which became an aggressive species that made more enemies than friends.  Once I got to the tribal stage, I was aggressive again killing every one of my rivals.  All of these decisions lead to the bonus of all weapons that are sold to me are discounted because of what I did during those early stages.  So again, try to remember that everything you do is leading up to what your species will ultimately become.

Creature stage

 Once your creature has eaten its way to being the biggest single cell creature in the pond it will be time to get out of the water and stretch your legs.  The button in the lower right a corner will begin to flash once you are done with your current stage.  After pressing the button you will be taken to a small cut scene and then the creature creator; only this time you have the ability to add legs and manipulate your vertebrae!

The most important thing to keep in mind is where you place the mouth on your creature's body.  The area of the mouth directly affects the way that your creature feeds itself.  Ergo, putting the mouth on the side of your body may not be as effective as the front.  Of course, you can have fun with this, but just remember you want to make a fully functioning creature.

Once you are settled with the first evolution of your creature, another cut scene will launch your creature out of the water and make him or her walk onto land with several companions of the same species.  When you walk out of the water, you are given a nest, this is your home and where you go to heal as well as to mate.  It is important to defend your home from nearby threats, although there are alpha males that stay behind to protect while you go out foraging, you do not want your nest to be next to aggressor creatures.

The general idea of the creature stage is to acquire as many different parts as you can to evolve your creature.  As you progress, your brain size will increase from having the knowledge of all of the different parts.  Once your brain becomes big enough you will enter the tribal stage which we will discuss in a minute.

At first, you are all alone.  You must venture out while not being killed by the other bigger creatures already on land to find the parts you need to make your creature more impressive.  It's a good idea to make friends with the species nearest to your home.  You will be able to protect their nest from threats but more importantly, once they are your allies you can convince one of their stronger specimens to join you in a pack.

Pack mentality is paramount in the creature stage.  Not only is it easier to get a kill if you have multiple people beating up on the same unfortunate creature that happens to walk by when you get hungry, but it also makes befriending other species easier.

In order to limit the amount of time you can walk around freely, the game makes your creature hungry very quickly.  If you get too hungry, you will starve and die.  Thus, it is important to locate a few weaker species that can be killed for food, just be careful not to kill too many or they will become extinct.

If dominating the planet by killing all of the other species is not your cup of tea, there is a more peaceful approach; make friends with everybody.  The way you make friends in this game is actually quite intriguing.  As you equip different body parts, you gain abilities in the social column such as singing, dancing, posing, and charming.  When meeting another creature you can express friendliness by imitating whichever move the other species makes.  For example, if they start singing, you start singing, this continues for three to five different moves until the opposing species considers you worthy of being their friend.

Regardless of how you choose to progress, your ultimate goal is to continue finding new parts which can be found in various places around the world.  The best pieces are found in the remains of extinct animals, usually found on the bones near some incredibly large and angry beast. 

Additionally, various times throughout the creature stage your home nest will decide it's time to migrate!  When this happens, your entire base will pick up and move to a completely new part of the world.  The new nest will be located in a more difficult part of the world.  This is to encourage you to keep evolving your creature to take on challenges that are more difficult. 

Once your nest has moved multiple times, you will have various high-level parts and be one of the most fearsome creatures on your world.  At this point, your brain will grow to the size of figuring out how to use tools.  If you haven't already, it's time to place some arms on your body to be able to grasp spears and other devices for gathering food or waging war.  You have now entered the tribal stage.

Tribal stage

The tribal stage is a bit more complex than the other stages.  This phase of the game is a very simple real-time strategy type of environment.  Your race has proven supremacy over the other creatures of your world and as such, multiple versions of your species have popped up all around the world.  Of course, only your species is the true species.

You must now fight the imposters of your own creation by making allies, destroying them, or a combination of both.  Your village starts out with only a few people and as you conquer other villages through diplomacy or by wiping them out, your village can grow to a bigger size.  The first step is to figure out a food source.  You can either kill creatures for meat or gather from plants, but either way just like the creature stage you must keep your food supply at an adequate level.

Food is not only important to feed your people but it is necessary to create new villagers.  You may create babies by clicking on your main hut at a cost of 10 food.  The cost is relatively minimal, as you get five food every time your villager brings back a supply of food.  However, the most annoying part about this stage is that you must micromanage your villagers into getting food and bringing it back.  In most RTS games, the gathering part of the game is automated so that you only need to tell the gatherer to go out and get food, wood, ore, gold, or whatever the resource name is one time.  In this game, you must continually keep sending your gatherers to kill something and then gather the food from the kills; they will not do it on their own.

As the tribal stage progresses, your village gets larger and changes appearance but it also unlocks new and more advanced tools to do your bidding.  You will be able to place more and more buildings that grant your villages different tools.  The new buildings will allow your villagers to use axes to go to war, spears to get fish, and fire torches to burn down your enemy's village.

Compared to the other stages of the game, this stage does not take very long.  Especially depending upon what type of creature you were in the previous stage.  If you were a predator, for example, due to being an aggressor species you will develop firebombs, which can incinerate an entire village.  Those special abilities make getting through this stage rather simple.

Of course, if you choose to complete this process in a peaceful manner, you can equip different kinds of instruments and play music for the other tribes to conquer them emotionally.  How you choose to show your dominance over the planet is your choice.  That's the beauty of this game, everything is under your control.  Speaking of control, how about we start controlling some machines!  It's time to enter civilization.

Civilization stage

 The civilization stage is another element of RTS.  The difference in this stage is that there are resources to control.  Unlike the tribal stage, when you send out a machine to gather this resource, it continues fetching the resource repeatedly until you tell it differently.

The tradable resource in this game is called spice, spices come in different colors and have different rarities, but ultimately the only way to make money is to mine and sell spice on different planets.  The goal of this stage is to have your city take control of the planet.  Other cities have sprung up once again all around the world and it is your job to take them over.  Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Except this time, you get to create the entire city.  When the cut scene appears to take you from tribal to civilization, you will be guided to create the town hall that will be placed in the center of every colony on every one of your planets.  The building creator is amazing; it has so many different kinds of blocks, which can be used to make a building of any shape or size.  Additionally, you are given windows and doors, as well as doodads to stick on your buildings.  Even more amazing is the fact that each one of these can be stretched to any size but when they are stretched the level of detail changes!  A simple window when shrunk down might actually have a huge awning with shutters and a spike when enlarged.

After you have created, molded, shaped, and painted your building, it will be time to create the rest of your civilization.  You will be called upon to create a new design for a type of machine, which will be used to wage war upon the other cities.  Just like the other creators, you are given an unbelievable amount of different shapes from which to build your design.  Everything from tank treads to miniature wheels can be used on your land machine.

One disappointing facet that you will find is that the weapons in the creator are for stat purposes and the general appearance of the machine.  If the weapons actually functioned, the design phase would be much more fun.  You can make the machine look as intimidating as you want, but it doesn't actually make the machine any better.  In fact, as you add different components to your machine, things like the speed and firepower are increased but the additional guns don't actually fire.  Therefore, what I found myself doing was creating a look of the machine that I liked, then shrinking down additional components that had some type of bonus, and sticking them in the middle of the body where they would not be visible.  This has the benefit of giving you the additional stats but avoiding over cluttering your machine.

Some people have already made some amazing creations.  Available on Sporepedia, you can find a train, different kinds of tanks, cars, and someone even made an 18-wheeler.  The level of freedom given to the individual to allow their creativity to flow is unprecedented.  The only problem is that it is largely aesthetic.  I would've preferred for each different part to have a different animation, so that I would have reason to create multiple machines just to see what they act like.

Back on track, after creating your machine, the goal is to take over the entire planet's spice geysers.  Again, being an extremely aggressive species, my first creations were able to complete the stage in less than two hours.  The reason for this is when making a city you can choose to make it industrial, religious, or military.  If you choose military, you can amass an insane amount of land vehicles to raid the other cities.  Once you fire upon the cities for long enough they will surrender and become yours.

There are other ways to accomplish the same goal.  You can use religion to spread across the world and end up with a zealot society.  You can also choose to advance your technology and amaze the other cities with your technological prowess; they will then align themselves with you.  However, just as in the tribal stage, the way that you accomplish the goal of dominating the planet is up to the user.

When you take over different cities, it will be up to you to design how they work.  You must design three different types of buildings, a house, an entertainment facility, and a factory.  The factory increases the amount of military prowess that you possess, the entertainment centers make your city happier, and of course, the houses increase your population.  Each city has a unique design in that the paths that the buildings are placed upon are linked to each other but not every building spot links to every other.

Why is this important?  In order for the entertainment and factories to work, they must be connected by a line to a house.  Factories connected to houses make a blue line, while entertainment centers connected to a house make a green line.  The green lines make your city happier whereas the blue lines increase the amount of spice your city can make per hour.  White lines are placed between two facilities of the exact same type and have no effect on your city.  However, connecting an entertainment facility to a factory creates a red line.  The red lines indicate decreased productivity and make your city unhappy, so it is best to avoid any red lines if possible.  Balancing your cities will make the most profit in both the civilization and the space stage. 

The last two things to create in this stage will be available after you have conquered a few cities.  Eventually, your species learns to create machines that operate on water and then machines that can fly.  At first, your machines will only be able to fly in the lower stratosphere.  This makes them the perfect weaponry to fight off an impending invasion.  Additionally, in the space stage these vehicles will be used to help fight off pirates when you are unavailable.

One large difference between the tribal and civilization stage is that you do not destroy the other cities when taking them over.  The cities will become your property to help you continue domination over the planet.  These cities will continue with you even into the space stage.  After you have conquered the last city by military or diplomatic means, you'll be taken to another cut scene of your species celebrating the unification of the planet. 

Your people have learned to master the art of flight and can now enter the space stage!

Space stage

The space stage is the final frontier of the game.  These voyages of the starship named whatever you want.  It's however many year mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations.  To boldly go where no one has gone before, unless you've already seen that part of the game.  Well, it's something like that anyway.

Spore is made up of an unknown number of planets stuffed into an incredibly huge galaxy.  Your mission is to make friends with every other species and/or conquer every other planet in the universe.  To do this you must create your first spaceship, and yes, you can model and name it after the USS Enterprise.

The spaceship creator is identical to the other creators except for the parts that it offers.  None of the doodads or weapons that you attach is for anything but aesthetics.  There are no stat bonuses in this phase of the game.  You will upgrade the internal parts of your ship as you complete specific goals in the game.

This part of the game is where you'll spend the majority of your time.  After creating the spaceship you will use for the rest of your time as that species, you will embark on many missions with the ultimate goal of becoming the largest and most impressive empire in the universe.  There are several nifty ways to go about doing just that.

First and foremost, you can sell the spices that are mined by your planets to other species.  This is the quickest way to make "spore bucks" but certainly not the only way.  You can also run missions, which range from going and eradicating a dying species to fetching space treasure or analyzing planets.  All of those missions will earn you loyalty with other species but none of them makes as much money as selling spice.

When you first zoom out of the extraordinarily large map of the universe, it is intimidating.  However, if you start out slow and make one friend at a time, the universe is not too big.  Ok, it is big, but you can manage by making more friends than enemies.  In fact, at first, you should do everything in your power not to make an enemy.  Once you make an enemy, they will attack your planets and attempt to take you out of the game.  Your ship is very weak until you start buying upgrades, so again it is extremely important to remain peaceful until the time, which you are more able to take on a fight.

Your first mission will be to find a species willing to buy your spices.  The in game instructions are very specific on how to find worlds that are occupied, you simply look for radio waves emitting from the planets.  After you make first contact, you will be able to run missions for them to gain their loyalty.  It is up to you whether they are a worthy of being your allies or a horrible species that must be wiped from the face of the universe.  Either way, you must continue on your journey to find more species, fight off pirates, and continue on your path to glory.

Along the way, there are a number of badges that unlock new and more advanced tools to beef up your spaceship.  These are completed by doing a number of tasks such as, flying into a certain amount of solar systems, fetching so many items, going to war with so many species, and the list goes on.  One particularly interesting facet of the space stage is the ability to perform terraforming.

Terraforming is the process by which you transform a planet to be more hospitable.  This is accomplished by establishing an ecosystem.  What you do is abduct small, medium, and large plants from different worlds and transport them to a planet that needs them.  Once your planet has all of the three plant types, you can add two different kinds of herbivores to eat the plants, and then one kind of carnivore to eat animals that eat the plants.  This establishes an ecosystem much like our own with a food chain that permits the planet to remain a paradise.

The higher levels of terraforming allow you to add additional colonies to the specific planet.  You must complete three different ecosystems in order to have the highest level of a terraformed planet.  Some planets are easier to terraform than others are, but all of them can be terraformed into a level 3 plant.  In addition to fully functioning, there are ways to create more aesthetically pleasing planets by gathering tools that are left all over the galaxy on various planets.

The space stage has one similarity to the creature stage in that as you make more allies and become more reputable you begin to have a pack of ships.  Your fleet increases in size as the game continues but the more ships you have, the bigger fights you can get into and come out of alive.  If one of your allies' ships is destroyed, you simply return to one of the planets of the species that you asked for a ship from and ask for another one.  That is one nice thing about this game, there is very little penalty for death.

Eventually, you will take your fleet into the center of the galaxy that is being controlled by an evil empire.  Your ultimate goal is to conquer this empire and find out the secret, which we will not reveal, that is being held in the middle of the galaxy.