First impressions of Spore:

Ok, for starters, my expectations for this game were very high. I've known about it for about the past two years, and the whole concept of the game is really quite brilliant. In a nutshell, the game encompasses billions of years of evolution, and you get to tweak what happens every step of the way.

Given that premise, I was expecting something with a little more depth. But, it's a game rated E for Everyone, and was obviously made with kids in mind. And a lot of the stuff in the game is kids stuff, mainly the cartoonish graphics.

I'm probably being too harsh about the complexity, since I've only invested a few hours into the game thus far. But I've completed all of the Cell stage, and I really don't feel there was much to it at all. Eat, grow, have sex, evolve, and then grow legs and move on to the next stage.

The creature stage is a BIT more complex, but not much. I only hope that once I hit the Tribal stage, things will pick up a bit.

Aside from that complaint, I really enjoy the gameplay. The controls are fine and easy to use. Swimming around in the cell stage was quite fun, and it was really cool when my creature would grow, and things that were once HUGE became bite-sized to me. (That huge green thing that I had to swim around became a morsel I could eat, for example.)

The music is a lot of fun too, probably one of the highlights of the game so far.

I haven't quite figured out how the online portion of the game works. I'm always connected to a server when I'm in the game, but I'm not sure how you go about finding buddies to play with, or if you can even do that at all. I read somewhere in one of the manuals that it's possible to intereact with other people's creations, but all the creatures I've seen so far have been computer generated by the program (it actually tells you this when you click on a creature.)

All in all, I will say it's worth the purchase. It's a very different and new gaming experience based on the familiar idea of The Sims, but expanded into a much larger scope and scale.