Spore (PC)

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Building tanks - and indeed anything else you might want - is a highlight of the game. Genital-shaped town halls are highly recommended!

Indeed, space combat is a total pain in the arse. Your craft lacks any form of lock-on system (apparently this kind of technology hasn't been developed yet) so you're forced to attack other ships manually, by clicking on them repeatedly. Of course, spaceships don't tend to sit still when they're involved in a life-or-death battle, so you'll also be chasing after them - which is where the limited perspective becomes a problem. You're left in a situation where you're using the mouse to pilot your craft, select your weapons, attack your opponents AND manipulate a fiddly camera, all at the same time. Not good.

Here's another problem: In every other stage of the game, you've been able to tool up your beastie/tribesman/tank as you see fit - but here, for some reason, you can only gain weapons through experience. Initially you'll only be able to defend yourself on the surface of a planet, so if someone attacks you during intergalactic travel, you'll have to fly down to earth before you can retaliate - a situation as irritating as it is ridiculous. Still, you better get used to it, because space fights seem to break out every five minutes in Spore's endgame. It's all too easy to piss off a race you've not even met by accidentally flying into their territory - and once you've made them angry, there's no reconciliation to be had.

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This is the major problem with the Space Stage: in the beginning, it's just too hard. All you want to do is to quietly learn the ropes, but the more advanced races of the world have no intention of leaving you be. If you're not lucky enough to have some friendly aliens nearby when you're starting out, then you're going to find yourself in hot water, very quickly. Dying isn't a problem as once again you have infinite lives - but bully-boy rivals will stop you from exploring and completing missions, which in turn hinders you from growing. Oh, and get ready for the fact that you'll have to return to your home planet at the drop of a hat, when your furious neighbours decide to pay you a visit.

If you can toughen up, you'll find a huge amount of things to do in space. Exploring is fun, particularly when you use your tractor beam to abduct new aliens - and especially if you let go at the last minute and send them plummeting to their doom. You'll soon learn the ability to terraform, using specialised tools to adjust the atmosphere and climate of a given planet to help it support the creatures you bring there. With practice, you can turn a barren rock into a lush jungle teeming with life. It's enormously satisfying... which is why it's a shame so many people will be put off by the difficulty. We consider ourselves to be fairly proficient gamers, and if we had a hard time with the Space Stage then it's likely that many casual gamers will be permanently put off from this part of the game.

There are other flaws too. The whole difficulty of Spore's last section wouldn't be a problem if you could restart from the beginning of a stage, but you can't. Sure, you can start a new planet with the same race and jump straight to space travel - but then you lose one of the coolest features in the game: the ability to scroll through an entire timeline of your creatures, from humble pondlife to galactic menace. The other minor bug that irritated us was the fact that in the Civilisation Stage, the AT-AT style walkers we built didn't actually walk; they did on the creation screen, but in-game they just glided along, which looked lame. Other walkers we downloaded behaved in the same way - we're not sure if this is a bug or a design limitation, but either way it was a bit of a let-down.

Despite its name, the Civilisation Stage can get pretty uncivilised. As with much of Spore, violence is quickest the route to progression - although it's not always the most satisying one.

You could also argue that some of the stages are a tad limited compared to the games they copy - but hey, what do you expect? If you want to play Civ, go play Civ - Spore is about the overall experience, and a hugely enjoyable one it is too.

A few years ago an author named David Mitchell wrote a book called Cloud Atlas, a huge novel that linked seven different stories, set in completely different genres and time periods. Some of them worked better than others, but somehow the subtle links between each section created something rather unique. Spore does the same kind of thing, but on a much larger scale. While each individual stage may remind you of other games, we assure you that the overreaching feel and play is like nothing you've ever come across: it's weird, surprisingly thought-provoking and above all else, fun. Of the hiccups we've mentioned, only the difficulty of the Space Stage really narked us - and we hope that's something that Maxis will address via a patch of some kind. At its best, Spore is wildly innovative; it would be a crying shame if a single defect were to deprive the game of the success it so richly deserves.

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