Eurogamer writes: "At the heart of Spore, say some, lies a fascinating, amusing, baffling contradiction: you're the Creator in the ultimate God game, in which you can succeed by imposing your beliefs on others, and yet Maxis' universe - a convincing mishmash of procedural and many-user generated species - is, as the game puts it, "an epic journey of evolution". One tends not to get on with t'other.
However, as with so many things (religious fundamentalism, for instance), the mistake was to accept the premise; Spore isn't a God game, it's a many-Gods game. In it you guide the development of your species from a single cell in a 2D ocean onto its newly formed feet, along a prickly path to abstract reasoning, problem-solving, emotion, science and interstellar conquest, with rest-stops in savagery, tribalism and tank-rushing. As you do this, thousands of other real-life players do the same and their species become part of your game-world, adopted by the AI ruling their own planets to greater or lesser effect."
9/10