Drifting through the vastness of space, a lone asteroid breaks apart as it descends on a planet, exploding on impact. A tiny fragment, almost microscopic, flies into the vast ocean, and as the ice keeping it together melts; life is borne where once there was none. Welcome to Spore.

Will Wright's fascination with letting people play god -- from SimCity in 1989 to the game that garnered Will -- and Maxis -- worldwide fame and cemented EA as the top-dog in game publishing for over half a decade, The Sims -- has led to Spore, the first game where your actions truly feel godlike. But a new Sim game this wow powerleveling is not, and this is apparent right from the moment your asteroid fragment breaks apart and you lay eyes on the amoeba-like creature you're going to manifest.

No longer a mouse pointer magically setting fire to the denizens of an arbitrary city, or moving some poor guy's sink to the back of his yard, forcing him to forgo sleep in favour of washing his dishes -- rather, you are this single-celled organism, and you need to fight for survival amongst a multitude of other simple creatures.

At the start, you're prompted to choose between being a carnivore or a herbivore, and that determines whether your little cell starts with a meat-eating jaw or a collection of small tentacle-like appendages for tearing apart microscopic wow powerleveling plant matter. You direct your cell around and eat accordingly. Eating -- and surviving -- are the only real objectives for this first section of the game, which plays like an organic blend of fl0w and Pac-Man, and becomes progressively more difficult as your cell becomes multicellular -- bigger and more complex. Eating earns you points towards evolution, which takes place when you call a mate, sending you to the much-touted creature creator.

Thanks to the well-marketed and timely Spore Creature Creator downloadable demo, many people by now are familiar with how the creator works. It's truly a magnificent piece of software, and allows for some amazing things to be made within a few minutes. Even people completely unfamiliar with the typical conventions of a game can wow gold get the hang of the creator in a matter of minutes. The cell-stage creator is very similar to the freely-available demo, but works on a 2D plane, and has a very small number of parts. It's simple and will quickly get you used to how the creation process works, if you aren't already. You can switch out any of the parts you've currently got, including your mouth, allowing you to go from herbivore to carnivore (and eventually omnivore) if you so choose. Any parts you add or remove will alter the performance of the animal, and this remains the case for the majority of the game.

The sheer size of the game and its malleable nature means that the limit is quite literally your imagination. Spore certainly isn't flawless -- the camera controls could be much tighter, especially in the space stage. Being unable to pan up is extremely wow gold frustrating when you're being attacked from above, and a lack of auto-targeting makes dog-fights somewhat frustrating.

The difficulty curve may also be far too steep for some (within eight hours you will have gone from 'Pac-Man for Dummies' to managing the politics, economics and living arrangements for a dozen solar systems), but this is a rare case in which the grander vision far outweighs the smaller imperfections.

The creative options on offer here live up to the three-and-a-half year hype, and Spore genuinely revolutionises the way user created content is implemented on a global scale.