A great game for those who like to create, but does have its shortcomings...
Storyline
After selecting your planet and diet (Herbivore or Carnivore), you are greeted with a cutscene of a meteor hurtling towards the planet selected. It lands in the ocean and breaks apart into little tiny pieces, which break open to reveal a randomly-generated single-cell organism. You are this organism. Welcome to Cell Stage.
Cell Stage gameplay is simple. Swim around on a top-down tidepool, eat plants (Or meat-bits), avoid predators. You can find small pieces of meat or plants floating in the tidepool. Your objective is to eat these pieces. Eating them gives you points known as DNA. You can use these points to attach new parts to your cell to speed it up, or make it more powerful.
After collecting enough DNA, you are given the option to evolve into a creature. When you decide to evolve, you are given a cutscene in which your cell swims away from the focus of the Cell-stage camera to who knows where...and get to add legs!
This final evolution before the next stage gives you the ability to tilt your creature's spine upward or downward, and add more spine segments! If you had an Omnivorous diet, you get to use the Proboscis!
After adding legs to your creature (Hopefully!), your creature swims upward, off the screen, and begins another cutscene. After a good 10-20 seconds of loading (maybe more, depending on how strong your computer is...), your creature is seen swimming to the surface and calling its friends with a high-pitched cry as it walks onto the green (Or blue...or yellow! Or even...) surface of the planet. Welcome to Creature Stage.
Creature Stage is more complex than Cell Stage. You are given a plethora of new parts to use and are also given the option to make friends...or enemies...with other creatures. You can obtain even more parts by befriending or killing other creatures or by digging up the skeletal remains of other creatures. By gaining more DNA, you can add creatures (Of different species, even!) to your party, known as a pack, to aid you in the socialization or destruction of other creatures. Just...watch out for the Epics, okay?
Once you obtain enough DNA, you are given the option to evolve again! If you do decide to move on, you are given one final edit of your creature. Be mindful of this edit, because, without a mod(And I don't support mods), this will be the last time you edit the actual body of your creature.
After you're done, you are given a cutscene where your creature discovers fire! Although...it does take a few tries to get it right. :)
...Welcome to Tribal Stage.
In Tribal Stage, you design the placement of 6 different huts and your creature's outfit. You can still socialize and destroy, but it's a bit harder, since you need certain huts to equip your creatures with weapons and instruments to ransack or play for opposing tribes. You control a multitude of your own creature via StarCraft III drag-and-click gameplay. You can harvest fruit, meat, fish, or eggs to add to your food total, which replaces DNA Points.
After completing Tribal Stage, your creatures evolve in a cutscene where the Chieftain asks for suggestions about the new city you're about to build. Depending on your evolution path, the first three suggestions will either be Religious (An eye with six spokes surrounding it), Military (Tanks and such), or Economic (Sporebuck symbol, which looks like a tornado symbol, but with steeper spokes), but the fourth suggestion will always be the same: Pie. Everyone is confused. The Chieftain facepalms. Welcome to Civilization Stage.
Civilization Stage is like Tribal Stage, but you control three kinds of vehicles (Land, Sea, Sky), and the layout of your buildings (Houses, Factories, and Entertainment Buildings) affects the performance of your city(I.e, a house by a factory decreases happiness, but increases Spice production, but this can be countered by putting an Entertainment Building next to the house, increasing happiness).
Your goal is to buy out, convert, or destroy other cities to gain total control of the planet. The only thing standing in your way is...you. Copies of your own creature run the opposing cities.
Once you complete this goal, you enter the true sandbox of the game: Space Stage.
~Spoilers ahoy! If you don't want to spoil it, skip ahead to "Play And Replay Value" !~
Space Stage is the final, neverending stage. You create your own spaceship, purely for anesthetics, and fly around the cold vacuum of space, conquering or befriending other planets, controlled by other creatures. There is a total of 7 Archetypes, determined by your choices in the past.
Bard: The social, friendly, party-hard creatures. Their dialogue consists of fun times and plans to eat you. :)
Zealot: The religious creatures that worship the god Spode. They are hard to keep a good relationship with.
Warrior: These creatures focus on destroying the weak and becoming stronger. Also hard to keep a good relationship with.
Ecologist: These creatures enjoy nature. Their dialogue is like a hippie's.
Scientist: These ones are intent on studying the universe.
Shaman: This Archetype involves being one with nature, and all sorts of mystical technobabble.
Diplomat: These ones follow the Philosophy Of Order and consult the Grand Council for answers.
Trader: These ones like to flatter the player character. Their only allegiance is to the almighty Sporebuck.
There is no definitive objective to Space Stage, but there is a reward to getting to the center of the universe...without getting blasted to pieces by the Grox first!
You can run errands for other empires to improve your relationship and gain Sporebucks. Sporebucks, the currency, is used to buy new weapons and tools.
~Spoilers over~
Play And Replay Value
For the first time, Spore is an exciting game and is lots of fun. It does phase out a little after playing it for about 30 times or so, but it still retains the endless possibilities of creating creatures, buildings, vehicles, what have you (Except flora...that was removed.)
Bugs
Spore is a fun game, but does have its issues. Being a large game, it has several bugs that can be helpful or hurtful. One such bug is the "Invisible Limbs" glitch. Using this takes practice and patience. This bug doesn't affect gameplay, but it makes it look like your creature is floating!
Another bug is called the "BAD_DATA" glitch. This is potentially game-breaking, as it gives any planet, empire, and creature existing in Space Stage the name of "BAD_DATA", making missions impossible, as the box in the top-left corner will read something like "Go to BAD_DATA in the BAD_DATA system.". This is sometimes (Read: SOMETIMES.) caused by installing expansions or mods (I'm guessing mods, mostly). I've heard stories of players getting this, but I haven't got it. Spode hath spared me.
Expansions
Now, we move on to the expansion packs. Unfortunately, Spore nowadays is classified as abandonware, so there was only two expansions, but also one patch freebie and a promotional set of parts.
-Creepy And Cute-
This expansion adds new paint jobs, new detail, mouth, foot, and hand parts, and new backgrounds for use in Test Drive mode. These parts follow a specific theme: Some of them are based around cuteness and cartoon-like styles, some are based around more "neutral" styles, and some are based around a demonic, evil look for use with creatures that may or may not eat your soul.
If you're feeling creative, you can make creepy creatures with the Cute parts and cute creatures with the Creepy parts (I created a creature called the "Biotic Irex" based off of the "Bio" ability in Darkspore. It's not shared, unfortunately, but it looks eerie and uses Cute parts.), or maybe even combine the two together!
In my opinion, my favorite parts are the "Jeweled Rampart", the "Extractor", the "Heeltoe", and the "Beefteef".
-Galactic Adventures-
This expansion adds two new editors and one new paint job.
The first, primary editor is the Adventure Editor. Adventures are missions that you can play through and create. They can have up to 8 segments, called Acts, and take place on a customized planet. You can place and program creatures, buildings, vehicles, flora (Still can't create flora, but you can use precreated flora from the Maxis team), effects, and gameplay objects like bombs and teleporters.
The second editor is called the Captain Editor. It is a modified version of the Civilization Stage Outfit editor. You can also add defensive or offensive "Captain Parts", themed around the 7 Archeypes, to help your Captain progress through the Adventures.
The expansion also adds a paint job. It's supposed to give your character a "Star Trek"-esque spandex paint, but, apparently, it wasn't programmed well enough, resulting in some...interesting paintjobs. (Example: I created a creature under the name of "Sunburst Squeel", and using the paint resulted in a "bulls-eye" like orange mark around it's single hind leg.)
-"Exoskeleton Limbs" Freebie-
This expansion adds a new set of limbs. These limbs appear insectoid and are possibly intended for use with insect creatures. I created a creature named "Burrin", and these parts, in conjunction with the "Taptoe" Cute part, worked perfectly with it.
-Bot Parts-
This expansion adds new parts to make your creature appear robot. Unfortunately, it was issued via Dr. Pepper promotion only in the US, so those outside can't do the robot with these parts. I haven't obtained these parts yet, but hopefully, I can get a hold on a Pepper and nab these exclusive parts...mostly because the "Blinkojo" part looks cool.
Visuals
This game has okay visuals, and the "Sporepedia" layout is a good layout for an index of your...or others'...creatures.
Community
The game has a built-in sharing feature, which posts creatures and what have you to the Sporepedia. There are many creatures in the Sporepedia, and many users, but the community can get a little out of hand.
Sometimes, users will "leave Spore" for better games or just because the community is whack, but I'm going to hang around for a looong time.
Users usually create spaceships to announce events or to roleplay in the comments section, but they can forget the "GAprop" tag, which disables it from actually appearing in the Space Stage and whatnot, and the wolf heads, dragons, scythes, other such things, will pop up and annoy others. I, for one, am ambivalent about their existence.
The community is okay, but it can get messed up. Darn trolls.
The Main Point
All in all, Spore is a great game for people like me, who enjoy creating, but it has some issues that may or may not break the game, and the community can get a little irksome at times, but you do not need an internet connection to enjoy Spore. I give this game an 8.5.
+Good visuals
+Nice music
+Great creation system
+Good Gameplay
+Great Expansions
-Irksome Community
-Some glitches
-Controls can be bothersome at times, especially at Cell Stage
-In Space Stage, allies attack each other and I can't do anything about it.
~Zeyphr