Harsh realities

Spore is a very good game with the potential of being a great game. Its breadth is unrivaled; you trace the development of a creature from its single-celled phase to its dominance of the planet and eventual exploration of space. You get to customize everything, from the cell's look to your fully developed creature's spaceships, buildings, and tanks. This staggering scale is why Spore is often called Sim Everything by gamers.

But while you have great tools to customize, you actually can't interact with that world as much as you'd expect. Your customizations are limitless, but have almost no impact on how you play after the Creature stage. Sure, you have control over the percentages you want to allocate to a tank's health, weapons, and speed, but loading your tank with cannons is more aesthetic than functional. The designs you create for buildings may be inspired, but they don't effect gameplay at all.

Spore offers three tactical choices for your civilization, but they play quite similarly.

Sadly, once you've made your creatures look pretty, there simply isn't much to do with them. While Spore's customization is imaginative, your tactical choices are frustratingly narrow. You're consistently offered the same three choices: kill, ally, or both, and how you carry them out is almost identical no matter the choice or the stage. For example, if you choose to ally instead of kill, your strategies are very similar; instead of equipping guns, you equip flutes. Success basically becomes a simple numbers game, where you need to amass more resources than your opponents.