'Spore's' critters are cool, customizable but gameplay is lame

There's a sad fact of "Spore" that in the early phases all the other races the player encounters are doomed to fail. The best that he or she can hope for is that his or her genetic material will live on as part of the dominant species when time inevitably wipes him or her out.

The same thing can almost be said about the game itself. For all its hype and clever advertising, "Spore" actually is a truly brilliant system. But the game layered on it is so disappointing that the best gamers can hope for is that the engine will be used in the future for more entertaining enterprises.

The concept behind the game is one of evolution, both biological and social. Players create a species from the cellular stage and help it evolve into a pack animal, a tribal society, an industrial civilization and eventually a space-faring race capable of colonizing large swathes of the galaxy.

The game is superbly customizable. Through a combination of fighting, making friends and just finding interesting things on the ground your race is able to add increasingly complex parts to its anatomy including wings, grasping hands and spikes. The creature creator allows players to use these in near infinite possibilities, controlling how their parts are aligned and proportioned and a huge palette of hues and textures for color.

Customizability continues at later stages with crafting buildings and vehicles that your creatures will use to explore and conquer your world. Every choice is packed with both meaningful and purely cosmetic options. Variety can also exist within your own fleet depending on the city they came from. Even the music is customizable, with a national anthem that plays around your planets that others can hear when they fly by.

Sadly one area where the customizability is lacking is clothing for your race. While what you wear has a statistical bonus in the tribe phase, even when you move on to civilization and space there are only a few dozen options and much of these still include your tribal options resulting in space empires wearing grass skirts.

Resist any impulse to rush through your building sections to get back to game play because sadly, there's not much there.

The first four phases of evolution are all incredibly basic, many of them actually toned-down versions of other types of games. At cell level critters just run around eating things and avoiding being eaten. For pack stage they wander through the world either attacking other animals or trying to make friends in a simplistic "Simon says"-style game where they must imitate the behaviors of other animals, be it dancing, singing or posing. Things don't get any less repetitive in the tribal phase where the tribe performs music to ally with other races or just attacks them. One of the few good diversions in this phase is that on occasion UFOs will fly overhead and abduct your critters.

Choices, both in terms of the physical features of your race and their actions, shape their journey into civilization, creating a reason for replaying for players who want to see all the different options. A relatively peaceful race might become economic while aggressive tribes will form militaristic cities. These features determine how you'll take over the world, giving you special abilities to either disable your enemies or make other societies like you more. While the game may track the millions of years it took for the species to evolve, getting from start to space can take as little as an evening.

Space is where the most interesting game play takes place. After some very helpful tutorial, your race's first ship takes to the stars to encounter other aliens, accepting missions on their behalf to improve relations or using your military power to blow them out of the sky. The galaxy is populated by races taken from Maxis or other players that you can scan, abduct or kill. The variety is as big as the imagination of all the game's players resulting in everything from two-headed, plant-colored hippies to sentient penguin men.

While the variety of races is nigh infinite, the variety of things they'll ask of you isn't. The rewards of new technology and rank you get from accomplishing missions may keep you playing for hours, but the basic format of "go get this/kill this/destroy this" gets old quickly and even the crises that pop up lack novelty. Apparently there are just a lot of interstellar pirates and potentially ecosystem-destroying plagues to go around. Timed quests prove to be the most annoying as it's a big galaxy and it's easy to get lost.

It's undeniable that "Spore" is a beautiful design. The graphics are strong, and it really is an incredible feat of game design that any absurd creation players might think of can be instantly animated and integrated into the world complete with a voice and distinct ways of moving. It's just not particularly satisfying to play. But maybe someday soon it will evolve into something with the ability to survive the test of time and gamers' patience.