What is it good for? Well definitely something that's for sure. Why the delay in getting this article out? Well what can I say, sometimes with us it's a bit like Duke Nukem Forever - “It's done when it's done”. Ultimately with this game it was down to a couple of things, the immense scope of the game and it's complexity, and my confusion as to whether I felt the game balanced in all the right areas. Which, strangely enough has taken quite some time.

So what's the game about then I hear those of you who've been living under a freakin' rock ask? In it's refined and simplistic form – evolution. In it's more complex and dynamic form it's how you progress your single-celled amoeba up through that evolutionary chain to become a space dominating species. As with any game that aspires to have a concept that big we all wonder just how good it's going to turn out particularly considering it's large development time.

So, first things first, you pick your starting planet and enter the “Cell Stage”. Following a short clip showing a meteor crash into said planet, you break free of your rocky space-fairing bonds and start swimming around a squiggly pin-prick mass of cells trying to survive by thriving on whatever food you can find. As you'd expect to, this comes in the usual carnivore, herbivore or omnivore flavours. Whatever you've chosen to start with will dictate the type of food you yearn for and what mouth you'll start with although this can be changed at any point. You're either going to go hunt other creatures, lashing out with mouth and spikes, munch on anything green that crosses your path or a combination of the two. In each stage you'll have an experience bar and in this particular stage as it fills you'll grow in size and your environment will shrink with you. Very cool.

As you grow in size, you'll earn DNA points to spend on new body parts through a mating process to increase say, your speed or attacking abilities, and once you reach the pinnacle of your amoeba prowess, it's time for you to stretch your new found legs and get out onto land. So, calling all your buddies ashore, you set up a nest and start advancing in the “Creature Stage”. This is where you start really developing your creatures looks with loads of pick-ups to be found scattered around the island. Usually these can be found around other creatures nests and so your decision to befriend or eliminate these rivals comes into play.

Depending on which option you go for, eventually you'll have either wiped out all competition or have a lot of friends. Either way, you interact with the collectives you find and earn experience points towards gaining intelligence, which not only helps you obtain the next stage of evolution but add numbers to your pack allowing you to more effectively roam around the island both defensively and offensively. After a set number of “level ups” and a very 2001 Space Odyssey-esque cutscene – it's onto the tribal stage.

The first real change in gameplay comes when you hit the tribal stage as the game swaps to a more strategy orientated game. The object is to build up your tribe, impressing the locals or obliterating them. With each growth in your experience this time bringing more huts to build and allowing more members to be added to your tribe. So long as you keep your tribe well fed and happy you should flourish well, uniting the island in unison and transcending to the civilisation stage.

While the civilisation stage is much the same as the tribal stage, you're now able to build vehicles and are more interested in the economic growth – wow, don't you just grow up so fast! So now it's your choice once again in how you interact with the other factions on your island. Through war, religion or economy. Blowing up the nearby towns, sending out your fanatics to convert those heathens to your path or simply buying the city off them if you have enough cash. Once you've gone down one of these routes and everyone's on the same page, you're ready to advance to the 5th and final stage - “Space Stage”.

Building your first spaceship you reach for the stars to make contact with other beings on other worlds. While the game remains in a strategy of sorts, you can now jump from one planet to another hunting for relics, establishing contact and trade routes with other civilisations and wage war on people that really tick you off. This stage really comes at a point where you think it can't get any bigger, and you'll soon see that you're mistaken. Space is big. Really big. Filled with loads of planets to set up new colonies on and terraform to your liking.

That, in a nutshell, is what Spore is all about. Your evolutionary process from Amoeba to Space and how you choose to get there. Phew! OK, so that really is a brief description of each stage and so a word on gameplay's needed!

If you pre-ordered or got yourself a copy of the Creature Creator then you'll have a decent grasp on what's expected every time you mate and produce and egg. The thing about Spore really is just how customisable it is. From every element of your creature to the buildings and vehicles you make – the scope of customisation is just stupidly vast. In a good way! If you want to create a hippo with 5 eyes, go for it. If you want to create a midget monkey with 3 arms and 2 mouths, you can! That's pretty much a game in itself, let alone when you can take the creature for a test drive and realise that whatever you've done will be feasible. Some creations might work better than others sure, but they'll all try walking and emoting as much as the previous. So essentially, the customisation of any creature you make is seemingly endless.

If jumping straight into the tribal stage then you can take advantage of all the different parts that make up your creature. Similarly if you've unlocked the appropriate stages this can be done for the housing and vehicles in the civilisation and space stages. Like when making a creature, the vehicle and building process is just as vast. When following Spore back in the early days, with a simple outlined game synopsis and demonstration of what was possible when creating a creature, the customisation was the key feature. As with many a title, the gameplay it would seem, was moulded around this feature to obtain the Spore we know today.

Although we're talking about 5 stages, I'd say that the more important stage is the space stage and is ultimately what you're working towards. The amoeba stage is simply an aerial point and click game which is over fairly quickly, and while the graphics remain quirky and colourful as you'd expect from the look of the creatures in Spore, seeing everything shrink around you as you grow - it's over pretty quickly. The creature stage, changing over to a 3rd-person perspective, has a lot of ground to cover and lots of pickups to grab, but aside from the social mini-games you'll play as you eat or charm your way through the other tribes, this stage is over fairly quickly too. Moving on to the tribal stage it becomes more of a strategy game whether you either impress or eliminate the other factions which, regardless of the number of times I've played it never really seems to be that difficult. These 3 stages can be done, if you choose, very rapidly and don't contain much in the way of lasting gameplay but aim more in gearing you towards a final decision on how your creature will look and play.

Things start to get a little trickier once you reach the civilisation stage, as the options grow in how you become King of the Hill. Religion is all about impressing towns with your faith. The economical route would be to set up trade routes between cities in the hope to shift the economy enough to buy out that city. Lastly, well the only real option left is to obliterate your opponent by any means necessary. Certainly at this stage it would seem that while the difficulty balance hasn't really come into play at this point, the civilisation stage can prove a little more trouble; particularly if you go down the aggression route. I'm not sure whether it was a point of Maxis to slap you on the wrist for causing trouble in the neighbourhood, but it certainly seems a damn site more difficult to act as a hostile and still win the day. This too applies to the space stage that you'll reach upon competition, or unification of cities, if you will.

It's probably easier to think of those 4 stages as a prequel to the game, a way of defining the way your creature, and your personality traits affect those around you. The space stage will simply knock you on your arse. It's massive. Hell, that word doesn't even convey how much you'll be able to play this stage. It's where the game begins if anything!

You now own a space ship, which hopefully you've kitted out to your liking. As with the previous stages, it's up to you how you shape the other factions around you. The general idea of this stage is to expand your empire by setting up new colonies on other planets. Each solar system has a series of planets and moons for you to explore, finding new items or encountering other creatures at varying stages of evolution. The currency is now spice, a commodity which comes in a variety of colours that can be mined from the planets and moons you set up colonies on. In order to be able to set up a colony the planet of choice has to be able to sustain life. Sure, you can plonk a colony down on any ol' thing, but they'll keep their shield up until they can actually breath – so perhaps you'd want to do this to claim the planet, but not actually start production.

So, terraforming and improving the atmosphere for profitable sites is certainly a possibility, as is buying the planet from a local faction similarly to the previous economic route in the civilisation stage. Either option works, but I'd say that picking your own planet is certainly the more entertaining approach. You can get planetary improvements from your own HQ or from other factions, which will all have varying prices. It's certainly prudent to shop around before you buy something to save yourself a few thousand. Once you've chosen a planet and have the necessary devices to improve the atmosphere, you can head over to your planet and get making it a better environment. This is called the T-Score and goes from 1 to 3. Each time you improve the atmosphere you need to introduce new planets and animals, which you can abduct from other planets, in order to maintain the T-Score.

There are also ways to improve the temperature of the planet with unlockable devices. These devices can be obtain in exactly the same way as the previous, as can any other unlockable upgrades you obtain. They could be upgrades to your ships cargo hold, or new and more power lasers as examples. You can unlock this content by performing tasks or achievements, if you will. Another way of obtaining new and interesting things is to be diplomatic with your surrounding factions and going on missions for them. This has the added bonus of making them happier with you, gaining those important steps towards making them allies.

Allies can be important even when going down the aggressive routes as allies will provide you with a decent and stable income, and provide allied ships that can go on missions with you or help provide additional fire-power when defending. The varying colours of spice also means that certain races will buy certain coloured spice for a hell-of-a-lot more than some other faction would. So making friends is certainly a good idea, even if they are as fanatical as you are!

I should probably mention at this point that if you zoom out while on the galaxy screen you'll see thousands of dots. Each of which has planets to explore and new creatures to encounter. Whether or not the sheer scope of this stage is overwhelming or not, the options are near limitless and allow for a factor of replayability we see less of in the games industry these days.

I think I've waffled for far too long on this game and sunk too many hours in the title to warrant just how good this title is. It's best if you just grab a copy and start making your own impressions in the world of Spore. See you out there... somewhere!