Spore feels very much like someone decided to take all the good game ideas of the past ten years and compress them all into one game only to realize that that’s far too much fun and excitement in one package so let’s dumb it down a little a lot. You start by “designing” a single-cell organism—and by “designing” I mean decided whether to put the mouth on the back or the front of the elongated blob that is you—and you float around a prehistoric ocean eating other blobs with mouths on their asses until, in some great misunderstanding of genetics, you manage to eat a creature that leaves behind a genetic mutation you can add to your blob body (sound familiar?). So every now and again after you’ve eaten something that left behind a new spike you can hang off your head/ass, you’ll call out into the ether, find a mate, and produce a baby which takes you back to the character design screen.

It’s worth noting that at this point in the game, the character design screen is a little bit fun and exciting because it’s new and you’re still curious as to how these new mutations will help you kill other blobs (unless you decided to be an herbivore in which case you’ve already shut off the game for being incredibly boring). So maybe you try to line yourself with spikes or you try an electrocutey thingy or your spit poison and it’s all very novel and just as it’s starting to get really fun, you grow a brain, evolve onto land, and get taken back to the character design screen. If you’re not ready to stop enjoying yourself, you can keep floating around and eating things, but it won’t do you any good because the game has decided that the fun is over and no, you won’t be finding any more mutations.

So you’re back in another character design screen where you can give your blob with a mouth and ass-spikes some arms legs. If you’ve ever played a wander-the-wilderness-and-kill-wildlife type of game, this will feel very familiar to you because that’s pretty much all you do, only almost every creature you encounter is half your size and strength. Spore tries to create the illusion of depth here by giving you the option to befriend or kill other tribes, but the process of befriending other tribes is so dull and stupid, I promise you won’t do it more than once (it involves singing and dancing). Unfortunately, some of the fun of killing is removed as well as some of your formally kick-ass mutations become sissy bullshit, e.g., my formally kick-ass electrocutey thingy now just makes me more charming. Right.

The evolution at this point of the game feels even more shallow than the last because it becomes obvious very quickly which are the useful mutations and which aren’t (killing things, yes please. charm things, fuck you) and immediately the game starts to feel, well, linear, which is exactly what Spore is being billed as not being. Before long, you’ve killed enough creatures to progress to next stage of the game: Tribalism.

Again we’re taken back to yet another character design screen (and by this point, you’ve already spent 3/5 of the game stretching your limbs and applying new claws to your creature so this screen is considerably unwelcome) where you’re asked to pick out some tribal outfits for your creatures that will help them in combat or socialization. First time I saw this, I gave a resounding “FUCK THIS!” and shut the damn game off. But Spore being Spore with it’s 10 years in the making and all that garbage, I felt maybe I’d missed something and went back to it last night.

Back in the character design screen, I give my creature a nice mask and a grass skirt and some knee pads and thereafter proceeded to Zerg-rush the nearest village and razed their town hall before the game finished teaching me how to control the camera. We got some new tools (spears and some bullshit I can use to make friends with. Lame.) and off to the next village who became the next head on my Totem pole (literally). An hour later, I was done. It was like someone had played the first Warcraft and thought “well, this is a good idea, but I don’t think my six year old niece could handle it, so let’s dumb it down a little a lot.” There was quite literally nothing to it. Click over here, let your dudes fight, get a new weapon, go get some food, repeat.

Twenty minutes later, you’ve offed your requisite five tribes, you’re given the option to evolve to the next stage, Civilization, which—you guessed it—starts with a fucking character design screen! No, I take that back; it starts with two fucking character design screens just to make sure that absolutely everyone playing the game is now completely sick of these things. Worst of all, the first design screen is completely useless! You build your City Hall which, unlike the previous three rounds, cannot be mounted with acid spitting boils or claws. It’s entirely aesthetic and has no impact on the coming gameplay so, of course, it’s the most involved and optiontastic design screen you’ve seen yet. My city hall was a box with a window.

You’re then taken to a vehicle design screen which, mind you, you’re never told a goddam thing about why you’d be designing a vehicle. You just see some parts with stats like “health” and “speed” an “attack” and you think “well, I guess my car will need to be fast and to shoot things” so you stick them on there with absolutely no idea as to what you might end up doing with your stupid car.

The civilization, as far as I could tell from the five minutes I could stand to play it, seemed almost identical to the last stage, only you could build more cities. Which, I’m assuming, meant going back to the goddam city hall design screen and I wasn’t having any of that.

I hear there’s a pretty interesting Space stage that comes after the Civilization stage, but I also heard that Spore is a well-made, fun, and innovative game so I don’t trust anyone has to say about this god-awful game. If you haven’t played any video games at all in any form in the past ten years or so, you might find Spore new and interesting and and full of exciting ideas. But if you’ve read this far in my review, you probably have so you probably won’t so don’t even bother.