Basically, you’re playing evolution. You start as a little organism and
work your way up to a spacefaring race. The game runs in five main
stages, all of which are pretty fun, but some of which are really neat.

I have to rank the game like this:

Stage 1 – Cell: Fun, arcade like, but entertaining the first few times you play it. No flexibility, loses interest quick.

Stage 2 – Creature: Probably the best phase in the game. Can be played very long and with many different strategies.

Stage 3 – Tribe: Limited but fun in a simple strategy game kind of way. Not nearly as interesting as Creature stage.

Stage 4 – Civilization: Probably the next best phase after creature, though it’s replayability suffers.

Stage 5 – Space: A nightmare of micromanagement. The interface
would be fun to play if only the game would make up it’s mind whether
you’re a free trader or a government agent, and handle income
accordingly. It would be *nice* if at least some things would manage
themselves, or the Empire would build MORE THAN ONE STARSHIP to handle
it’s problems. Even if I had to buy them myself!

The best thing about SPORE is the creature and vehicle creator.  We’ve built several of the alien species from Universe Zero  in the creature creator.  More fun than that, you can share creations with your
‘buddies’ in the game, so my friends can see what I make, and I can see what
they make. We’re also making ground vehicles and starships.  Now, even
the scary predators look a little cartoonish, but it gives a good
general idea of what your aliens actually look like.

As of the time I write this, we have made: Jakari, Dambaro,
Tikmijn, Mantid, and Acai Maj. I’ll make more as I get a chance.  Even though I’m making aliens in Minnesota, my friends in Oklahoma can just look at my creations on my brother’s computer instead of a simple screenshot.

I believe we plan to use the SPORE creation engine to build some placeholders for the Universe Zero wiki – aliens, ships, etc.  It’s not quite the same as getting everything done by a team of professional graphic designers, but it allows pretty good representations of your sci-fi races, vehicles, starships and buildings.