by Joel Meeks

Created on: August 02, 2009   Last Updated: August 05, 2009

Spore is a title that was put onto the shelves a little while ago by Electronic Arts, with an RPG-esque expansion pack (not included in this review) very recently being released for it. Spore had the expectation of being one of the largest, most customizable games of its time, and in a lot of ways, it lived up to those expectations.

The biggest drawback in Spore is the fact that each of the stages seem to go by so quickly. The first stage, wherein you begin life as a single-cell organism, is surprisingly fun, considering the exceedingly simple nature. You swim in your primordial soup, and either chomp down small bits of meat, or eat floating pieces of plant, depending on what sort of creature you are, carnivore or herbivore. Each piece of food that you eat will give you a small amount of DNA points, which you can eventually use to upgrade your creature, making it faster, stronger, and able to either hunt down or evade the other organisms that are, ultimately, trying to do the same thing. All throughout the stage, you search for different evolutionary parts, which can be obtained either through eating the other cells that surround you, or finding and breaking meteor fragments. These parts, which range from jets for speed, to proboscis for becoming an omnivore, are all added to the cache of parts that you can add to your creature, assuming you have the appropriate amount of DNA points to obtain them.

After twenty or thirty minutes of zipping around your undersea domain, and you become the dominant cell, you are given the option to continue on in your evolutionary process. After attaching a pair of legs to your critter, you crawl onto the land and start the process all over again; clawing and biting, or singing and dancing, your way up from the bottom of the food chain all the way to the top.

Depending on the decisions that you make during your cell stage, you will become a carnivore or an omnivore during the creature stage. If, during the cell stage, you decide that the best way to obtain DNA is by eating your fellow cells, you will become a carnivore. If your girlfriend is playing, and decides that eating the other creatures is too much to bear, all those plants that you eat will turn you into an herbivore during the creature stage. Becoming an omnivore is a somewhat difficult thing to master, as you have to keep a balance between killing the other cells for their DNA and eating the plants.

When you become a creature, you can become the dominant

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