Ah, yes, the legendary SPORE.

In SPORE you start out in the Cell Stage, which is an abnormally nuanced Eat-&-Grow game. This stage should really be called the Fish stage because right from the beginning you have eyes, which are multicellular organs, but...

As you travel through the Cell Stage you gather new parts to expand the abilities of your creature, eventually hopefully gathering all 6 new parts. At the end of the Cell Stage, you develop a brain and move on to the Creature Stage.

When this happens you gain the first of the permanent traits that will define you for the rest of the game, your creature's diet: herbivorous, omnivorous, or carnivorous. At every stage of the game, we betray our own arrogance by having the ability resembling humanity and our current global culture be both the middle of the road option (therefore harder to get) and the superior choice for the ability it grants you in both next and the last stage of the game.

In the Creature Stage, the game essentially becomes a very simplistic RPG. The gameplay is a dichotomy between socializing with other species to make them your allies and killing them off to drive them extinct. Both grant you Points of DNA that you can use to evolve your own creation, trying to form it into a highly adapted creature for the Tribal Stage. Both avenues of development lead to the gaining of new creature stage parts for evolving your creature, but to get the parts you really NEED you must find Skeletons, especially the biggest skeletons, which coincidentally are found near the largest and most dangerous creatures or areas. Some tricks can help you develop faster, such as befriending powerful "rogue" creatures, and using a combination of stealth mode, sprinting, flight, and careful timing to steal the skeletons around the lairs of the largest and most hostile creatures, but in the end, it's almost impossible to get every potential part. Sometime around when you get 2000 points to distribute for new parts, you are out of the Creature (adventure) Stage and into the Tribal Stage. When this happens you get one final chance to change your creature before it's morphology becomes fixed for the rest of the game. It must also be noted that any creatures from allied species that have joined your pack don't advance to sapience with you, but rather become your species domesticated animals...

The Tribal Stage is an RTS based on the same dichotomy between socializing with your neighbors to form alliances, (Tribes in this case, rather than species, though they often are other species as well, apparently mimicking the difference between the early Humans and Neanderthals,) and using warfare to exterminate your enemies. Somewhat Ironically, this is typically the shortest segment of the game, despite that it took over a million years for humanity, compared to which our barely 7000 of truly civilized living is but the barest blink of an eye. During this stage the undisputed key advantage is to be an omnivorous creature, as the best sources of food vary with a faux seasonal cycle, and the one available at the beginning, when gathering food is most critical, is fruit, but the one that's most consistent is eggs, which are a meat, as is fish, and carcasses from hunting... it also means you can use whatever gifts your allied tribes offer and the spoils from any tribe you defeat. Once you've allied with or defeated at all five other tribes you advance to the Civilization Stage, and, allies or enemies, all other sapients are wiped out on your planet...

The Civilization Stage is truly Unique, in that it is a combination of an RTS and A Four-X game. Your actions in the RTS Tribal Stage decide what KIND of Civilization you start as, be it Militant, Economic, Or Religious. Each has advantages, but when you hit the space era, you undeniably will wish you'd gone with the midline "Economic" option. As the game progresses you will build up cities with entertainment, industrial, and residential buildings. Pay close attention to happiness in each city, happy cities are more productive and harder for enemies to capture, but be sure to buy Turrets for defense too. An amusing point of note is the Kaiju, giant monsters that will attack any unit which gets close. They CAN be killed, but only by a supermassive attack of military vehicles. The reason this is a Four-X cross instead of the straight RTS I've been describing it as is the spice geysers and planes. Spice geysers are a major contributor to your economy. If you control all the spice geysers you almost certainly have a lock on the world already. You want to grab the spice geysers quickly and defend them carefully, even as you continue to conquer the AI controlled cities.

Then there are the planes. Once you gain four cities, you can build airplanes or more accurately "Air Units", because in addition to airplanes they can be everything from dirigibles, to helicopters, to UFOs and Ornithopters that could NEVER really fly, to bloody Back-to-the-Future Flying Cars!

These two elements, combined with the fact that you seize rival cities rather than destroy them, are the only reason I call this mode a mix of Four-X and an RTS rather than a straight RTS. However, if the Civilization Stage mixes RTS and A Four-X, the next stage takes everything else from all the previous layers except for the cell stage, and puts them in a Blender on Puree!

(One last word of advice about Civilization Stage: before you go to the Space Stage, fully upgrade every city in your empire. This includes giving them all the "decorations" they can hold, you can sell those again for seed money later...)

The Space Stage:

And here we come to the culmination of everything. All your work, all your many advances, your plotting and schemes, and evolution, it comes together here!

At the beginning of the space stage, you design a spaceship, which can look like almost anything from an over-engineered UFO to a Star Destroyer or a weird flying ocean vessel. No matter what it may LOOK like, it will perform the same...

You then take it out exploring and try to build a thriving interstellar empire...

With Just One Ship...

You Terraform Worlds, you trade rare finds and bulk cargo, fend off pirate attacks, colonize planets, and undertake Away Missions...

With ONE SHIP, crewed only by your character...

There's also no kind of Challenge balance for the away missions which are KEY to developing relationships with other empires.

All in all the whole thing is pretty screwy...

Almost like they were writing one last expansion to a very popular game that had made them a lot of money and they knew the fans would rush to buy thousands of copies before even considering that it might not be as high quality as the rest of the content they'd created...

Oh; yeah...