We've all been reading about Spore for nearly three years now, and rightly so. It promises to be Will Wright's definitive God game, bringing together gameplay that's influenced by decades of games across five game phases where players will cradle life from its beginnings, right up until the colonisation of space. It's no surprise, then, that Wright originally wanted to call the game Sim Everything. His previous masterpieces include Sim City and The Sims, so why wouldn't he? Nevertheless, the name Spore has an equally appealing ring to it.

Five, Is The Magic Number

The path of Spore follows five distinct game phases. These will flow seamlessly into each other, effectively creating one fluid game. The creature that you create right at the beginning of the game will carry through to the following four game phases. If you give your very first Cell five eyes, a poison gland and flagella, this will affect how this Cell evolves into the land animal you embody during the following Creature phase. Then, as your creature goes on to build a vast empire in the Tribe, Civilization and Space phases, the strategies you employed during Cell and Creature phases will influence the space-faring Civilisation that you end-up with.

However, we had limited hands on experience of a game that really needs hours of gameplay to get a hold on it. Additionally, Spore is still in a stage where Maxis are continually tweaking the main features to get the right balance. As a result, it's difficult to say exactly how much each separate phase will mesh into the next one, although Thomas Vu (a Producer on Spore) assured us that this sort of continuity will be present in the final game upon its release (the weekend of September 7th). Checkout TVG's Spore Q&A with Thomas Vu for more details.

The key to Spore will certainly be this very feature - how seamlessly and engrossingly each separate phase flows into the next one. If Maxis can pull this off, then gamers will get attached to their creations like a strip of Velcro. The little scamps that you can create for the Cell and Creature phases are astoundingly cute and, if Maxis can immerse you in their evolution, then Spore will be a great success. This is what forms our major concern about the game because, if Maxis don't manage to form this connection between player and Creature, then gamers could be left with five separate game phases that each lack enough depth to keep things interesting.

Each of the phases have been influenced by a specific game or genre. The first phase, Cell, has similarities to Pac-Man; Creature can be compared to Diablo; Tribe to Populous or The Sims; Civilization to, well, Civilization; and we're told that Space will have a distinctly MMO style to it. However, on the early build that we've played, each phase lacks the depth of the classic games that they are influenced by. You can play each game phase by itself (detached from the main game), but if the five phases are played in order they do form one large game in total, with a lot of variation in gameplay. Nevertheless, it's inevitable that each phase won't be as deep as the classics that Maxis is paying homage to.

The exception here is the Cell phase, because Pac-Man was hardly the deepest of games. In Cell, you're transported back to the primordial soup where you take control of a simple organism (kind of like a cartoony amoeba) from a top down view. You start off by pursuing tiny green algae balls (that's where the Pac-Man similarity lies) and, once you've consumed enough of these, you grow in size. The view then zooms-out to reveal more of the primordial soup, and you continue on your merry way by consuming more algae balls and pursuing the next level of growth.

There are also other cellular organisms around you, some of which are quite big and must be avoided, and others which you might be able to make quick work of. This instigates the fight or flea survival dynamic, and you can control where your Cell moves in this situation by directing it to certain points on the screen with your mouse cursor. We found that the way your Cell's movement is weighted was reminiscent of the arrow in the classic Atari arcade game, Asteroids.

As for the Creature phase, we can certainly see where Maxis has made the comparison to Diablo. It certainly plays very much like an avatar based classic RPG game, with constant levelling up and battling/socialising with other creatures being the key gameplay feature. Now that you're out of the primordial soup, the game environment has changed to an island that your creature can travel across with the aid of its new walking ability. What you do on this island will depend on whether you're a herbivore, omnivore or carnivore.

Carnivores have to seek out other creatures and exterminate them; herbivores must befriend other creatures by singing and dancing, while omnivores must complete a mixture of the two tasks. Of course, in order to exterminate/befriend some of the more advanced creatures on the island, you'll need to do some levelling-up first. If you're a carnivore, this is achieved by exterminating other animals and collecting their DNA. From what we could gather of herbivores, on the other hand, you have to move around the island collecting DNA from fossils that are dotted around the place, while nourishing yourself on fruit where possible to keep up your strength. Other than just levelling-up, DNA also has the affect of expanding a creature's brain capacity, which will ultimately lead it onto the Tribe phase.

In the Tribe game, the map once again zooms-out to reveal more of the planet that you're on, and your creatures have now formed discernible settlements (kind of like those of early man). Here you get the chance to do a little bit of base building by decking-out your settlement with nice looking huts for your creatures. This is presumably where some of the Sims elements come into the Tribe phase, as you'll no doubt want to make some flowery looking homes for your budding decapods.

There are also micro-strategy/RTS elements that take the form of conquering nearby settlements. We found that the jackhammer approach of simply selecting all of your units to swarm on one adversary was the best way forward, but the combat is bound to get more complex as tribe numbers increase and the phase develops. There was also the option to form productive relations with nearby tribes, which once again opens up the befriending option. As with all the game phases (apart from Cell), disasters such as volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes and UFO attacks can disrupt proceedings at any point, in a typically Will Wright style.

The fourth phase is Civilization where the map opens up to reveal the whole planet. What we saw of this phase was certainly a simplistic take on Sid Meier's Civilization, although it does have all the basic trimmings of the genre. As one of a number of city sized settlements on the map, your ultimate aim is to conquer the planet by Economic, Religious or Military means. Economic and Religious conquest will tend towards diplomatic strategies, while Military conquest goes with the bog-standard extermination strategy.

The micro-strategy of Tribe is replaced in Civilization by more of a macro-strategy approach; although we would point out that combat was more like an RTS than a turn based strategy game. It's a straightforward and rudimentary take on strategy gaming, but Maxis are being careful not to alienate some of the more casual gamers that will no doubt be attracted to Spore. This goes a long way in explaining why there's a cutesier feel to the various game phases rather than the serious, in-depth features of a hardcore RPG/RTS/4X strategy game.

The Space phase is the final phase of Spore and it promises to be the most enterprising as well. It picks up just as your creatures are leaving the nest of their native planet and flying off into space. Thomas Vu tells us that there will be hundreds and thousands of other planets in Spore, which should provide for almost limitless exploration. With the aid of your trusty UFO, it will be possible to terraform uninhabitable planets so that creatures can survive on them. Then it's simply a case of abducting a few creatures from other planets and dropping them on the planet's surface to balance out the ecosystem.

As with the previous Civilization phase, there will be empires throughout the stars that will have to be dealt with cautiously depending on whether you wish to conquer or ally with them. We've also been told that there will be an "Ultimate Quest" in the Space phase, which players can choose to uptake if they wish. Uncharacteristically for a Will Wright game, this could provide a discernible end-state to the game, perhaps allowing you to even feel like you've completed it. Who would've thought it, given the open-ended nature of games like The Sims and Sim City? However, the most fascinating aspect of the Space phase is undoubtedly how it's set to open up the game's Pollinated Content feature.

Pollination Across The Nation

Spore's Pollinated Content is certainly a very exciting premise. In its simplest form, Pollination can be described as user content from other people's Spore games being used to populate your own Spore galaxy. While Spore is exclusively a single-player game, you could theoretically play in a universe which is filled with creatures, buildings, units and UFOs that have been created by other Spore users across the world.

It all starts in the editors. There will be a variety of editors shipped in the final Spore game that will allow players to create everything from their own cells and creatures, all the way down to their buildings and units in the Civilization phase, and finally their UFOs in Space. We had a chance to look at the Creature and Cell editors, which enabled us to construct some truly alien creations. Our first Cell had nothing short of seven eyes, a water jet and some tiny propellers (which are apparently called flagella).

If that wasn't weird enough, the creature editor takes it to another level. Here you're given a short string of vertebrae with a lump of body shaped around it. You can contort this spine into shapes that would make big business for chiropractors, and the body then morphs to fit around the re-arranged vertebrae. Then you can add eyes, legs, arms, horns, tails and various other appendages to your heart's content. In the final game, the amount of these accessories that you can add to your creature will doubtlessly be limited to some sort of points system. Following this, there are also various other colour schemes that you can adorn your creature with as well.

Creating your creature is fun enough, but actually getting it out on the open plains makes you feel nothing short of proud. It's like watching your kid learning to ride a bike accept your kid has six legs and, instead of riding a bike, it's running excitedly down a beach with all its might. We can only hope for more of the same from the editors in the later parts of the game.

Whenever you create a new creature or building it can be uploaded onto the Sporepedia. This is basically the hub from which gamers will be able to take other users' creations and Pollinate their games with this content. Additionally, your various creations can be put into Sporecasts. The idea behind these is that users will be able to group certain types of creations together such as 'Scary Carnivorous Beasts', or 'Cellular Abominations'. These are then tagged in a search engine, allowing users to tailor their search for specific types of buildings, units and creatures. There will also be a rating system that ranks the most popular Sporecasts at the top of searches and lists.

Maxis has also added a social networking element to the Sporepedia that's similar to Facebook. You can create a profile displaying some of your creations, keep track of other users who have Pollinated their games with your content, and also leave messages on other people's profile pages to let them know what you think of their work. It's definitely a good interface for the Pollinated Content, making it very easy for gamers to create a universe of their choosing without having a great deal of technical knowledge, which will also open the feature up to the causal gamer - everybody wins!