Those waiting for someone to distil the epic Spore into a just a few simple words need only look at its initial platforms: PC, Mac, Nintendo DS, mobile and iPhone. Nothing tells you quite so bluntly how Maxis’ grandiose space opera, some eight years in the making, has had its orbit shifted by the irresistible magnetism of The Sims and its fans. It now inhabits a place somewhere between the infinite and Seattle, star child and Starbucks. Like one of its creatures, it’s been tugged, bent and squeezed, for better and for worse, into something resembling Silly Putty.

It’s a surprisingly easy game to describe: five snapshots of civilisation, four looking in at its origins, the last looking out to the stars. In Cell, you pilot a single-celled organism around a rock pool using mere clicks of the mouse, eating without being eaten, becoming carnivore, herbivore or omnivore simply by your choice of meat and veg. Marching ashore with newly developed limbs in Creature, you then forage or kill for food, customising your species with parts taken from piles of bones. In Tribal, you climb the rungs of early civilisation, discovering the power of tools for hunting, gathering, charming and conquering. Civilization is more an RTS than Sid Meier’s game, but with the familiar goal of blasting off into the cosmos, where the final stage unfolds like the great spacefarers of old – Star Control, Imperium, Alpha Centauri et al.

The important bit is that everyone you meet, every vehicle you encounter and every building you erect or destroy might be the product of someone else’s spore. The chance to craft and accessorise comes at every turn, the results shot into the game’s online ‘data cloud’ before precipitating back into other people’s games. In all likelihood, anything you could make out of the aforementioned putty could be moulded by its design tools, which are some of the most flexible and entertaining ever seen. And nowhere is the game’s science more visible than when injecting life into those hastily plugged joints and limbs, taking procedural animation to a freakish, chucklesome new level.



The rest is like a chapel built around this user-created fresco, a place to be inspired as much as – maybe more than – entertained. Its guarantee is that you’ll never know quite what’s over the next hill, its servers deciding which creatures will be there to fight or flee, which tribes will offer you a serenade or a spear through the head, which ships will bombard or enrich your cities, and which faces will fill the view screen as you orbit every homeworld. This isn’t just the heart of the experience but the bulk of it, the stages themselves feeling like primers for deeper, more satisfying genre games.