Spore is not a game. It feels like a platform, or to put it another way - Spore is a brand. What you get in the box is actually five distinct games all based around the same aesthetic and design principles, loosely tied to one another with a cute art style and upbeat music. It is a game of contradictions and confusion, at times breathtaking in its vision and design, and at others rudimentary and altogether obsolete. How is it possible that one package can contain so much endless wonder and yet also have an equal amount of boredom and repetition? How can you turn a universe of possibilities into something that ultimately feels like it has been done before years ago?

From the beginning of the game, the core design is presented very clearly and very economically. You begin in a tide pool, struggling for success among a sea of critters, bugs and plants that all strive to survive in that harsh environment. Collecting food and battling larger, more fearsome beasts is the dish of the day. As you gather supplies, you can upgrade your creature, giving it teeth and claws and bigger eyes, upgrading the stats of your monster as you go too - providing more speed and agility. Like Rocky, you can literally have the eye of the tiger, the cream of the fight. These very rudimentary, RPG-esque aspects of the game persist through the other phases too, with each minor achievement rewarded with more ‘money’ in which to go ’shopping’ for body parts. Even at these incredibly early stages of the game, you are shown what you will be doing for the majority of your time. Much like the Sims, most of your game is spent shopping for new things to put onto your character; in this case, swapping shoes and hats for claws and teeth. Should I get the mandibles or the pincers? The snout or the wings?

Throughout the rest of Spore, you are faced with yet more choices. So much so that it is often all too easy to make a mistake and regret it later on. This is exacerbated by some rather arbitrary and confusing design choices. Why does choosing a herbivore lock my creature down the path of pacifism and religion? And why can’t I change it mid-game? If I add a huge row of spines to my creature, why does it only marginally improve in ferocity in battle? Why do my ferocious Underbeasts from the bowels of the Earth have the same combat capabilities as an oversized Carebear? Why are the all-consuming Deepkin with their taste for flesh and bone still forced to socialize with nearby tribes to succeed, and why are they troubled with creating music and speech when all they want to do is consume the entire galaxy. There are too many moments in Spore where you just feel annoyed and confused and wish you could go back to 45 minutes earlier to redo things differently. Over and over.

And this brings me to my biggest gripe with Spore, the illusion of freedom. For a game priding itself on being completely open and allowing incredible choice and design possibilities, Spore is restrictive. I have played through the entire progression of the game several times now, and it has been a very repetitious experience. More so than I expected. After a while playing it, you just want to jump to the creature phase and start building things again, making the tide pool phase redundant. While the game does allow this, giving you freedom to explore all stages once completed, it means that you are not getting as much value out of the game as you expect.

This situation is made worse by some stages of the game being frustratingly poor, and the massive gulf in quality between some of them is even more confusing. Spore at times is indeed a revolution in game design. The creature phase allows unparalleled freedom to create, providing a robust toolset to model and sculpt your wildest dreams. But then following that, you have the tribal phase, forcing you to take a step back from your own creature and herd around a group of them in a very simplistic RTS game, fighting warring factions and conquering the area with sticks and stones, spears and axes. But for all the ingenuity of the creature phase, this next one feels like a bad RTS from ten years ago. While it certainly isn’t attempting to be the pinnacle of strategy, it is fair to say it is a major letdown. I wasn’t expecting a depth of strategy akin to Civilization 4, but what I don’t appreciate is when a game attempts a gameplay mechanic, fails, and then is excused because ‘it wasn’t aiming for perfection’. Extended periods of time playing Spore feel like one letdown after another. Too many parts feel like ‘My First RTS’ or ‘My First Exploration Game’ and mean that if you have played any games in those genres before, you will be let down, no question.

Even moving into the endgame stages, the game persists in this shallow, aesthetically focused gameplay. In the Civ phase, you can replicate the creature editor to create buildings, vehicles and many other kinds of structures and devices. But again, it all comes down to what you want them to look like and little else. I have often criticized other games for not allowing you enough visual freedom, but the detachment from gameplay found here in Spore is so big, it’s become annoying. Conquering the planet is clumsily handled, with very few methods of achieving this goal. Either you destroy everyone or you convert everyone. This stage feels so much like Black and White 2 that it is almost incredible that you don’t have huge cows roaming around the place. The hours I spent in the editor making everything look just as I wanted really don’t have any impact at all. And while the game has extensive online features allowing for the sharing and propagation of my species, the fact that I can’t really get any feedback on my efforts with any competitive multiplayer or co-operative modes means that I felt massively let down by the end, as though I had just gotten a shiny new sword in an MMO but there was no one else on the server to show it off to.

Spore, then, is a mixed bag. Some aspects of the game have clearly been reigned in drastically from the initial designs and feel much worse than the rest. But where Spore really benefits is the hugely innovative creature phase, which could provide endless enjoyment. Having spent a lot of time in the Sims just designing families and building houses, it is easy to see that this aesthetically focused aspect of the game is where their designers really know their stuff. Unfortunately, I could see buying the Creature Creator standalone being a real alternative to the whole game, which falls flat in so many areas that, in the end, you always fall back onto that one aspect. It is pleasing to see the meteoric rise of your creature from humble beginnings to galaxy-spanning overlord, but the path you take to get there is paved with disappointment and frustration. With vast sections of the game pointless and annoying, the value of the game is diminished. While the strategy parts of the game later on are clumsy and simple, if you haven’t played that genre before, it is a nice introduction. Just don’t expect much replayability. Compounded by years of hype and false promises, the game delivers an interesting mechanic but little to do with it.