When the founding father of the biggest selling PC game ever, speaks, everyone sits up and pays attention.  With an obvious knack for ascertaining what will make a uniquely enjoyable gaming experience, Will Wright is a revered gaming figurehead indeed.  To supersede his astounding success with The Sims, Will needed something pretty revolutionary.  But would you credit it, he’s only gone and succeeded!  At this year’s E3 expo he gobsmacked crowds with his latest brainchild – Spore.

To classify Spore into a defined genre is simply impossible.  It branches out from classic gaming roots, and draws multiple gaming styles together to replicate the favourite bits of all Will’s favourite games within the same title.  Just consider the scale on offer here.  You start as a single cell in the primordial evolutionary soup at the beginning of the world.  Your goal?  Galactic domination.  Yes, seriously!

Spore claims six separate gaming styles that facilitate this evolutionary journey.  The first Tidepool phase covers classic arcade gaming routines, including what can only be described as contemporary version of Pac-Man.  Things soon turn into a more RPG feel as your cell enters the Evolution Phase and starts taking on a distinct physical form, even fighting and devouring other creatures to enhance various attributes.

The Tribal Phase now turns in an RTS direction, where your personally cultured creature breeds, and so you have a whole tribe of your own unique brand of progeny.  The following City Phase takes an even more distant role, delving into management gameplay, progressing the technological and economic growth of a vast city of your creatures.

The Civilisation Phase expands to a global scale where you attempt to conquer the rest of the world you inhabit, whether by force, diplomacy, or just downright cunning.  Then things peak into a heady climax with the Invasion Phase, where you can not only explore the rest of the solar system to invade other planets, but also venture wider into the entire galaxy, in which there are thousands more solar systems.  ‘Breathtaking’ is a distinct understatement.

Things become even cleverer when you realise the truly freeform nature of the entire game.  The creature you build is not constrained by predefined skins or models; it actually dynamically evolves according to the way you build it up.  Thus no two people will ever grow the same creature.  Additionally, the game automatically downloads the creatures made by other people, so the planets you invade, although controlled by AI, are inhabited by the creations of all the other players of Spore across the world.