This is my first post in the community, I hope you like it!
Spore is a very particular title that brings together several interesting playable themes, besides being one of the most successful titles of Maxis, a company that is popular for the creation of Sims and their sequels, although this time they wanted to do something different inspired by the theory of evolution, in Spore we create our creature from its most basic stage to the most advanced for it with many customization options with what we will surely have enough to make our species something quite unique, In the early stages we will be first a bacterium that goes through the ocean looking for how to feed on smaller beings but as we move forward having greater control over the other species that we can eat we can go having greater control over our ecosystem to the point of conquering an entire galaxy.
This game consists of several stages where we go from a bacterial organism through a wild or animal stage, reaching the point where it evolves into an intelligent species and is gradually walking to the domain of space, is a proposal that consists of several stages all with different playable proposals to each other, but as we go through we realize that together form a solid experience from start to finish, so, from the first steps of the game we will have the possibility to familiarize ourselves with the interface and its components which indicate what stage of evolution we are and how much we need for the next, in the ocean of our first stage we will only have to feed on other beings to grow our species and reproduce, it is a fairly simple stage where we will be defining the characteristics of our creature, the important thing about this game is that it also works as a kind of RPG in which we can define the behavior of our character.
So we can also decide if we want our species to be carnivorous or vegetarian depending on external factors or our way of playing, this system becomes more complex as we pass having the ability to further define the characteristics of our creature as the way in which it mates or how it interacts with other species, also something that from the second stage is quite well defined is whether our creature will be a predator or will be a little more sociable with its environment, something that we can take to the extreme in both contexts and that works very well with the system that has the game where no matter who we are there are always other species that are radically opposed to ours and may have other plans (such as attacking us)!
Each mode has something special to add to the Spore experience and never feels overloaded.
The Tribe mode or the first hint of civilization in our species also opens other possibilities in the game making us able to develop weapons that allow us to hunt the other species as well as interact with the tribes around us, at this stage it does not change too much our style of playing but it does add much more depth to the gameplay being able to create our first structures and expand our species even more with some mechanics that already from the moment we start our expansion as a civilization we integrate as the construction of vehicles or constructions that help us to start the industrial era in the game. Again the ways we have had with other species will determine whether we become invaders or communicators, both with their own characteristics reflected in our vehicles and buildings.
The next stage once we get all the resources we can on our planet is to look to the stars and this is where the dynamics of the game changes a bit because we will not have both control of a single individual of our species but several ships where we can explore the universe and meet with various species on other planets, once again we have to decide if we want to be a conqueror of planets or a pacifist in search of unifying the galaxy, this is only one of the decisions that has this final mode where we can also collect resources from other uninhabited planets, The design in Spore is carefully placed throughout each stage and I must say that it is simply brilliant how it catches every charm making worlds that remain etched in the retina, also the customization system of our character hosts such a high variety of options that we will get lost in the possibilities every time we want to change something to our species (in case you did not name it, we can modify parameters of our species as aesthetics or to add special abilities).
Spore is a vast world worth exploring, it's not much like any game I've played before or since, Maxis' game is a well tuned combination of various stages and mini-games that together form one of the most diverse and fun experiences I've ever played, I still completely remember its design and how I had fun with its variety, maybe nowadays it's eclipsed by other better games but Spore will always have a place in my gamer side.