Once you have a bunch of DNA, you head back to the nest and get romantic with another creature in order to evolve your kind. Following some romantic dancing, an egg will appear and the Creature Creator pops up and prompts you to evolve your creature once again.

Depending on the amount of DNA you have collected, you can add
claws and other parts that increase your social skills dancing, singing, pose and charm – all used to make friends with other creatures. If they dance, you dance. If they sing, you sing. Mimic them enough and you'll gain a new friend.

After growing your brain a bit more, you're able to add more creatures to your pack or group. In combat, a bigger pack means faster kills and protection while in social actions, more singers and dancers helps to successfully add friends quicker. The creature stage is a relatively simple game that lacks any depth beyond the strategies around equipping your creature with the tools they need to evolve. By the end of the level, our creature looked like a Tijuana taxi turned inside out with lots of dangling bits, used to improve our social skills.

The next evolution, Tribal level, begins with a short trailer with the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as your creature throws up a stick, gets conked in the head and discovers fire. In tribal, creatures have buildings and must delegate responsibilities like food gathering to fellow tribe members. Rather than attack the only other tribe on the map, we're told to build a hut for maracas, then grab the maracas and put on a show in an effort to convince them to ally with us. After aligning with this tribe, you score a bigger hut to make more babies, who after a short time hit war-fighting maturity. You're also given more options to create a hut to add options for gathering canes (better food gathering), flaming torches, throwing spears, didgeridoos and the like.

More tribes appear on the map afterwards and the next phase of Tribal begins. Defend your tribe from others by chucking spears and flaming torches, the ultimate goal – dominate the other villages so you can evolve.

At its core, Tribal is a basic resource gathering game where you get more food, domesticate a few creatures, use the food to make more babies, make the matured members into workers and replace dead members with new babies until the next stage of evolution -- Civilization.

The Civilization stage seems disconnected from what you've played so far. Rather than managing creatures, this involves balancing out your city with labor, factories and entertainment complexes. This is not SimCity-style civics, though, the only real rule is to keep factories and homes close and keep entertainment complexes away from factories, which maximizes the city's profit. Once you're captured all the planet's cities, or allying with another civilization that does, your creatures evolve for interstellar travel.

Instead of gathering DNA, moving on to the next level also depends on mining spice (yes, there's a Dune joke somewhere here). Each civilization on the map gets two Spice Geysers and profit is used to build a fleet of cars and ships to build trade routes with other cities. As the money piles in, you have to option to buy cities or disable their geysers by bribing the workers. You will also have to make alliances or conquer other cities through military, economic or religious means. The end goal is to rule the planet by owning all the cities. Of course, the cities fight back, some you can buy outright after establishing trade routes and sending in religious vehicles to convert a city while bribing a Spice Geyser crew to hand over the goods makes for simple real-time strategy game -- albeit challenging depending on how you play.

The space game is the most compelling of Spore's levels. After designing your ship and learning how to fly, you leave the atmosphere to explore new galaxies. Using a SETI detector to scan planets for radio sounds of other empires, you fly to ones that sound interesting, make trade agreements, alliances, buy entire galaxies and set up new colonies on other worlds. While lush worlds and civilizations offer new goods to buy and sell (and shopping around is encouraged), maintaining new colonies or terraforming planets is incredibly fun. You transform the atmosphere, transplant flora, fauna and animals from other worlds and it's just another way that players create their universe. As in other levels, completing assigned tasks, making alliances or buying worlds grows your evolution. Combat does happen and if you're a militaristic type, you have the option to destroy other worlds in order to expand your reach. Alternatively, you can take the capitalistic approach, horde large amounts of Sporebucks and just buy everything.

In the end, does Spore deliver? Spore doesn't make any major mistakes, looks good and is relatively easy to play. But in the quest for evolution, many of its stages feel like dumbed down versions of popular PC games with the space game leaving a really positive impression. Hopefully, this Spore has planted a seed with casual gamers, one that will someday let them enjoy a taste of other games that have already evolved.