Game for your Buck: Spore

Setting:
Someone on a distant planet you evolve from amoeba to beasts, to tribal humanoids, to civilized humanoids and then finally space age humanoids! This was a wonderful idea with vast potential. Unfortunately EA wound up slapping the gameplay together as sloppy copies of other games that you can enjoy far more and for far longer for free. Although some parts of it are decent.

I was very excited for this game. I bought it on the week it was released for $60. Big mistake.

Amoeba Stage:
It's a simple mini game of "run into things smaller than you to get bigger". Although you can play this sort of thing for free on many flash sites this one had a twist of originality to it. With the mating calls, populating and evolution there was enough interesting content to make this a decent stage and fun intro.

Beast Stage:
Grow legs and walk the earth! Neat stuff. This was actually exciting. You start running around with gameplay similar to WoW. Although instead of "leveling" you earn new parts, limbs, claws and jaws for your creature. You can be predator or prey or both depending on how you evolve and how you play with other land creatures. This was probably the most fun stage.

Tribal Stage:
With the discovery of fire and strength in numbers your race becomes tribal. There's not much to say here if you've played any RTS game ever. This stage is a very watered down. It was quite boring... but you get to dress up your creature a bit with feathers, shells and other tribal garb.

Civil Stage:
Yay vehicles and buildings! That's good right? You spend most of this level creating and re-arranging buildings for maximum efficiancy Sim City style. Although, again, this mode is very watered down. The RTS style combat remains stale and the only plus is that its with your custom vehicles. You also get more civilized clothing for your creature. Like top hats!

Space Stage:
Discover and colonize other planets by using technology to make it hospitable to your race. Very cool. Although after about your 5th or so planet you'll learn it's very same ol' same ol'. You do get to meet other lifeforms at various levels of evolotion. So you can meet creatures still in the tribal stage and mess with em. Very fun. You do, however, meet other races of equal intelligence and power to your race. The combat is similar to an awkward 3D galactica. Very boring in my oponion. But hey, custom jets!

Overview.
If you enjoy customizability you'll enjoy this game very much. This game is comparable to the sims in style. So I'd reccommend this game for younger audiences or for people who aren't very experienced in gaming or for people looking for something casual to experiment with. Spore would be a nice gift but it is not exactly a worthy purchase in my opinion. This is a very casual game and it is also very silly. So expect a few chuckles, but don't be disapointed when you find yourself stuck in repetitive and oversimplified combat. I'm no elitist but this title isn't very immersive so don't take gameplay too seriously. This game is for making velociraptor wizards that fly through jets in space. Not for pwning noobs.