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It's easy to admire the scope of Spore from a "reality" perspective. The concept of tracking a small organism in the primordial ooze, following its evolution into a complex creature, and watching subsequent development of its society - straight through to that of a spacefaring race - is immense. It's an impressive undertaking, and in person it comes off well. What's more noteworthy to me, however, is the breadth of gaming that's covered by Spore. It includes a bit of resource gathering/management, a bit of real-time combat, a bit of RPG leveling, some unit-group management, and through it all, a content manager and editor that ties in the personalization/collectible genre. That's a lot of gaming to be included in a single title! Thanks to some always-handy dev cheats, I had a chance to see Spore in all 5 stages of game play, which are (in order): spore, creature, tribe, civilization, and spacefarer. I'll give a short rundown on each segment, and then some overall game impressions as well as a peek at features that don't fit squarely into a given phase.

First up is the spore phase. This is a very laid back set-up designed to familiarize the player with basic concepts and controls. It reminded me a little of Pac-Man, with the added wrinkle of chasing down the pellets you need to eat, be they plants or other spores. You can purchase some simple changes to your spore that allow you to specialize a bit, making you better at gathering DNA strands from your chosen prey, but for the most part, this level is a warm-up! It IS true that how you behave in the spore stage dictates what options you start with in the creature stage, but really, there are only SO many ways to eat plant matter or other little critters.

Next up is the creature stage, which brings in the already released creature editor. Using said editor, you spend the DNS strands that you collected in the spore stage to evolve some appendages and take to the land! This stage is where the RPG vibe kicks into gear, and you get to level yourself a critter. Specialized legs, wings, mouths, horns, antennae, these are just a FEW of the items you can add to your body to increase your ability to do things. There are similarities to the spore stage, where your main objective is to eat plants or other creatures, but the creature stage is where the main dynamic of the game begins to kick in, namely: socialization versus aggression. Even if you find and consume plantlife exclusively, you're GOING to run into other creatures, and you'll need some way to deal with them. You do this by finding creature parts (that you may add to your body and use) and what parts you uncover are dictated by your behavior. Race about devouring vast quantities of plantlife, and you'll discover creature parts that help you find and eat plants. Likewise, attacking and devouring other creatures helps you find parts most commonly used to augment combative abilities. It's important to note, however, that you'll never pigeonhole yourself. The game provides mechanisms to find body parts, here and there, for just about anything, and it's extremely unlikely that the player will ever feel handicapped or crippled by their inability to deal with a certain obstacle. Eventually, through intimidation or through social virtuoso, you'll gain an ally. This ally can augment your abilities with a similar skillset, or complement your weaknesses by performing tasks that your creature might have problems doing. In either case, your tribe has begun, and the way it begins - once again - reflects what options you have at the beginning of the next stage.

The tribal stage introduces tools, and provides the ability to befriend and domesticate animals. At the beginning of the stage, your tribe will set out to dominate the immediate region in some way, establishing your growth mechanism with an initial set of tools and social mores. Once you're "on your feet," you expand outwards, and inevitably find some neighbors. Your tribe continues the socialization versus aggression theme by warring upon or befriending the neighboring tribes that you encounter. There are actually multiple ways to accomplish either of these things, so it's certainly not a binary decision, but the generic result is typically the more important factor. As your tribe grows, you'll gather in more and more resources, either by battling other tribes and taking their stuff, or by combining forces and sharing the wealth. Much like in the creature stage, these resources grow your tribe relative to how you gathered them, and provide you with new abilities and tools that are appropriate to your path (once again, without completely pigeonholing your tribe into a single growth avenue). At the end of this phase, your tribe will have an array of weapons, instruments, tools, beasts, and possibly allies that have been provided by your subjugation or social overture. Congratulations, the scope of your tribe has swollen into that of a civilization.

The civilization stage introduces another set of editors: buildings and vehicles. Players can use these to customize the most essential bits of their civilization, and tailor their function to match the expected plan for their society. (I feel obliged to note that the vehicle I was shown was a purple boat with pair of all-terrain robotic legs. Fantastic!) "The plan" is, of course, the constant duality of aggression and alliance. This stage most closely resembles an RTS, as you have a wide array of tools to deal with other civilizations on your planet. Warfare, economic competition, religious conversion, traditional alliance ... all these things come into play, and more. As you grow across the planet, you'll gain access to new technologies that allow you to improve and expand the scale of your buildings and vehicles, once again reinforcing the organic feedback that causes gains to take the shape of their acquisition. Once your very own purple-footed boats freely walk the globe, with nothing to fear from any competitor, you'll have achieved planetary domination - at which point you're ready to take to space! The space stage plays a lot like the creature stage, and returns to the RPG feel. I don't want to give TOO much away, but you can well imagine that you'll be able to evolve space technologies and move out into the galaxy, dealing as you see fit with other planets and their inhabitants.

Speaking of planets, EVERY STAGE I have mentioned is affected by the planet on which you choose to evolve. Some planets are more suited to one method of growth than another, so you need to get a handle on what works, as well as what your immediate desires are. As always, the goal is not to trap the player - but smart organisms adapt to their surroundings! Once you're done with a planet (and the rest of the galaxy), you can go back and look at a neat little chart that maps out your progress from spore through galactic overlord, and export it with the content-sharing system so your friends can see the complete life of your spore. Evolution-mapping isn't the only thing you can share, either. Spores can have theme music created with a music editor, and that can be shared. Particular vehicles, buildings, and creatures created with the editors can be shared out and imported into other games. Editors also "carry through" stages, so if, in the tribal stage, you decide to tweak a little something on your creature (or a friend wants to in their game) you can certainly do so. As you can see, there is a LARGE amount of content in Spore, and it's all highly replayable. Everything that I saw at E3 makes me think that Spore is going to be a hit with multiple genres of gamer - especially considering the unique crossover opportunities and the sense of community that the extensive sharing mechanisms make possible. Look for this one in September!