With a control scheme bound almost exclusively to mouse buttons and wheel, Spore is a smart and indiscriminate borrower, no game considered too old or primitive to inherit. Flow, Powermonger, Diablo, Black & White, WarCraft, StarCraft: all have been tossed into the primordial soup. What emerges is a childlike vision of exploration, survival, growth and war that deals in universal terms: drag and drop, nasty and nice, friend and foe. The impulsive brutality of Creature is actually quite terrifying, pack hunters flirting with you before chasing you down and devouring you. It’s also quietly crushing to watch a city being obliterated, its people screaming while a sad-face emoticon rises from the rubble. And, yes, as you pull back from your planet, through a field of countless others and out to the silent swirl of the galaxy, it will give you pause. Spore speaks in tones as simple, welcoming and affecting as those of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

At its worst, though, it’s a troubling enigma. Of its first four stages, only
Civilization offers any real replay value, leaving an immense amount riding on a botched finale, Space. In the quest to find the secret at the heart of the galaxy, much of which involves building an empire of terraformed, sculpted and colonised planets, the breathtaking is saddled constantly with the clumsy and repetitive. There’s plenty to find and buy that makes life among the stars easier, but the housekeeping involved – zooming back and forth to fend off pirate raids and alien invasions, scouring landscapes for vital tools, sustaining alliances, sponsoring wars, manually carrying and trading valuable spice, the list goes on – is unbearable. In what many will see as a complete misfire, it limits the mind as its universe expands.

In its defence, Will Wright says that he’d rather see the Metacritic scores and sales of The Sims 2 than Half-Life 2. Well, at least he’s honest. But even looking beyond the planet-sized ‘if’ that hangs over its sales potential, Spore is a stark reminder that while greatness in this market doesn’t always equal success, true greatness is almost seen as anathema to it. Something as transcendent and overwhelming as the game we hoped for – the infinite, mind-boggling space odyssey suggested early on – doesn’t sell expansion packs. It doesn’t fit on to iPhone. It doesn’t fill the vacuum left by The Sims. It doesn’t have a place in that universe.

7/10