With the IncyGamers gang now fully brained-up and all other civilsations crushed under our mighty fist of fear, it was time to conquer the Spore universe and begin our conquest of the Spore Universe.

Spore comes into its own at the space stage, it’s not until you reach this level that you can truly appreciate what Maxis are trying to achieve and once again the game’s controls change as you become the captain of your civilizations first spaceship which is pieced together in the ship creator. Like all the other creation processes your spaceship’s body, cockpit, weapons and propulsion is all pieced together and with the USS IncGamers now created it was time to reach for the stars.

Moving away from the RTS model, the game shifts to controlling your new spaceship which is handled with the mouse buttons for movement and mouse wheel for altitude. It’s not until you start moving the mouse wheel to take you out of orbit that you realise the scope of Spore. The higher your ship climbs, the more of the Spore universe you see, and it’s immense. If you thought conquering your own world was a challenge, it’s nothing compared to what lies ahead. Find new planets, colonise, and reach out to the other civilizations in the galaxy; the Spore universe just became vast.

And this is as far as I’ve got having played Spore for nigh on a week now. I have mixed feelings about the game so I’ll address them now before making my final verdict.

The attraction of Spore is the ability to create your own creatures, vehicles and housing, and through the pre-defined templates, components are dragged from the parts menu into the vehicle creator creature or housing creator. Spore boasts about the ability to be free with your creations but that is a slight exaggeration. You have to work from the template parts to piece together your creatures, vehicles or buildings, so there’s a limit to what you can pull off and how creative you can actually be. Having said that, there are not many games that give you this level of freedom.

Throughout Spore the game encourages you to achieve with a ‘level-up bar’ at the bottom of the screen and this does drive you to keep playing. Once I reached the space stage and realised how massive the universe actually was, there was a sinking feeling inside. The game had just become huge and I knew progress from here on in was going to be at a much slower pace. Now this can be viewed as a positive, who wants to play a game that’s going to be easy? However, it does beg the question as to whether Maxis should maybe have dropped the earlier stages of the game. I’ll be honest here, the first few stages can get tedious, especially the creature stage.

Maxis may have been better to begin the game at the Civilization stage, increase its scope and allow gamers to create their creatures with the Creature creator at this stage of the game but at a more advanced level of development. There is really no desire to go back and start a new race and go through the early stages of the game all over again and this game is really all about galactic exploration /conquest.

The community of Spore players will drive this game thanks to the in-built Sporepedia which is your connection to other Spore players. Spore fans can share their creations and make them available to other players. Creations are downloaded from the Spore servers and added to your game so there’s going to be some weird and wonderful buildings, creatures and vehicles appearing in your copy of Spore. This is a huge part of the game but it’s still really too early to say how successful this will be and whether it will keep Spore gamers hooked. So far it appears to be working but if interest wanes then so does the content. Let’s hope gamers stick with it.

Gamers looking for immense graphics are not going to find them in spore, the game does look good but has obviously been designed to be as compatible as possible which is, in this day and age, a plus. The game’s quirky style works well in lower resolutions so Maxis has achieved their goal.

Spore is not an easy game to pin-down. The early parts of the game are easy to complete, and once you reach space, they’re almost throw-away. These early phases in themselves do not make Spore a great game and are in fact too simplistic. Spore only gets juicy after a few hours play and its here that you start to see Will Wright’s vision. I would have loved to have played against other Spore players in real-time in one huge universe, the space strategy Time of Defiance is a great example of how this could have worked, now that would have been immense.

We have to mention the DRM issue that is obviously an anoyance. Three installs maximum and you have to call EA. Not a great move by EA and it's not exactly stopped the game being pirated within 24 hours of release. Please stop adding this to your games EA, it's a right pain for those customers who legitimately purchased the game.

At its heart, Spore is essentially a space conquest game, but it’s no Masters of Orion. Spore is a game that will appeal to the masses and its success will be down to Spore players who keep the content fresh and interesting for others to enjoy.

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