SPORE is the latest game from the creators of The Sims and Sim City. Having played both of those games and enjoying them, I thought I'd take a chance and buy this game as well.
The premise of the game is to evolve from a cellular organism to a full blown species capable of space travel. The game starts out by allowing you to customize the look of your cell. After that you basically run around eating other cells and then you earn the ability to to upgrade your cell, either with weapons or friendly features. I of course chose weapons every time to start my conquest of conquering everything in the game.
After awhile of that, which is probably the only boring part of the game, you move on to walking on land. There is a great deal of customization in this part of what your species looks like. With this stage you can start attacking other species and also add members to your gang of warriors.
After this the game zooms out more and allows you to control multiple members of your tribe at once. This part of the game is similar to real time strategy games. I found this part to be quite a bit of fun but not to hard to manage like some other games are.
After that you move to outer space. If anybody has watched Star Trek this part of the game is a lot like the original series. You travel from star system to star system contacting alien life forms and either helping them or conquering them.
I slowed down a bit at this stage and got a bit friendlier trying not to aggravate too many other life forms.
The game has got a rash of bad reviews on computer nerd sites due to its' anti-piracy DRM that is included with it. While DRM is evil and all, the game is really great and I would probably only care about the DRM if I owned the game but didn't buy it.
The only complaints I have about the game is there is no way to reverse evolve or return to stages earlier in life (other than starting a new saved game) Sometimes I'd like to go back and be a tribe again. I give SPORE a 9/10