Many reviews of Spore, including our own, have been critical of the rather shallow gameplay design in the first four segments. Rock Paper Shotgun has posted up a new Q&A with the alien evolution sim's lead designer Alex Hutchinson who attempts to explain the choices they made in the gameplay depth.

On Spore's phases being too easy at first and then switching to the complex Space stage in the end, Hutchinson states, "I quite liked the idea that casual players will enjoy the first phases more, then become less interested and perhaps just start again or play in the editors, and hardcore players will become more interested as the game progresses." Later he adds, "We deliberately did things to the 'game' part of Spore to enable the editors to be more powerful – it's no surprise that you can do virtually anything in the editors, as every time we had a potential design decision that would limit that, we chose to put the burden into the gameplay third, which was truly difficult, but it was the core assumption of the game. We were trying to do something different."