When you get your creature on dry land you encounter some other comrades as well that happen to look just like you. Your location contains a number of other creatures, each more different than the last, that are also competing to be the king of this planet's evolutionary chain. If you are a herbivore-based creature your main goal is to make friends with others. This is done by approaching another nest and socializing with the creature (singing, dancing and the like). In this respect Spore is a little like a music rhythm game. The game shows a meter above your creature that registers how well you are doing to impress the other animals around you. If successful they become your allies and will even help you out by walking with you.

Of course, you can go to the carnivore path you don't really care about making friends. You'll want to eat them instead and make their species extinct. Spore actually resembles an action-RPG in this part of the game as your character attacks other creatures, making sure that the creatures they go after are close to the same level of development that your creation is set up to be. Eliminating a species gets you more DNA and more chances to upgrade your creature to include better mouths to bite, better hands to strike and better horns to charge with, among other things. You get these better items by either random drops by killing enemies or by going by skeletons that are across the land and gaining those items from that source. Ultimately, it's up to the amount of DNA you have stored up to give your creature the kinds of items they need to survive.

The second creature stage took much longer than the first; we think most players will get though it in a couple of hours. While it's a bit repetitious, there are a couple of surprises as you get into the final stages. Those surprises include encountering massive creatures that you couldn't possible take out by yourself but they have no problems eating you up. We even saw one airborne creature that "beamed" up smaller animals from the ground.


Whether you are mainly a herbivore or carnivore, you finally get to the end of your evolution and your brain hits that point in 2001: A Space Odyssey where your creature discovers a twig and sees it as a tool rather than just a twig (there's even a cut scene that's an obvious homage to that film). You enter the creature editor for the final time to make adjustments and changes to your creation. Once you move to the next stage your creature is done.

That next stage is the Tribal portion of Spore, which resembles a small scale RTS game. You have a chieftain and your followers who must get food (your resource for making more members) and deal with all of the other tribes around you that have also got a brain and want their own piece of the pie. You can make peace with some of the tribes or go to war with them. Again you can upgrade your tribe to have better weapons and technology to hunt and the clothing editor gives you more options to make your creature your own without actually changing the creature itself. You can even choose to domesticate wild animals.


We haven't yet gotten into the final two stages (Civilization and Space) but from what we understand it's the Space portion that really shows off the depths that Spore really has. Visually the game is as expected; very cartoony and even a little goofy looking in parts but the procedural animation used to make your creatures come to life is pretty amazing. But will the final portions of Spore make a good impression? Stay tuned.