doesn't achieve the seamless evolutionary process and absolute player expression it first promised. What it turns out to be is something quite different altogether, a bizarre experiment of ideas that, incredibly, focus into something truly remarkable. Spore isn't what anyone thought it would be, but it's still a triumph.

The platitudes and criticisms can come later, though: first, the facts. Spore's brief is that you climb a custom-made beastie up the evolutionary ladder, from cellular pipsqueak to land-walking animal to tribal half-wit to civilised sentient and finally to space-faring ultra-being. Along the way you're tailoring your creature's appearance, behaviour, costuming and eventually vehicles and cities. While your experiences may mirror another player's, your sights most definitely won't. Spanky procedural generation tech sees the way your creations move and communicate depend on their design. Stick eight legs on it and it'll walk totally wow powerleveling differently to a six-legged creature – and even to an eight-legged creature with its limbs placed differently. Clearly it's the game's under-the-hood tech that's making this happen, but crucially it adds to that sense that you've made something.

The first two stages are at least fairly charming. The first, Cell, is akin to Flow on PS3/PSP – a pretty simple affair of swimming and eating to increase your size and, occasionally, gain new abilities. For all its tranquillity, it seems throwaway and it is – but that's at least partly because it's a tutorial in disguise. Spore is, after all, trying to attract an audience beyond traditional PC gamers – the Sims audience, to be specific – so it needs a gentle way to break them in. The Cell stage does have its own merits but what it's really there for is to train a total newcomer in movement, collection, combat and customisation – four of the pillars the wow powerleveling game as a whole is built upon.

On each planet you colonise, you can create new vehicles and new buildings, though there's no more direct control of them. You can seed planets with new life, or eradicate existing species. You can artificially uplift backwards races so that they become wow gold another space-faring force to interact with, or you could simply terrify them for kicks. There's an amazing random moment in the earlier stages where you're pottering about eating fruit off bushes or locking horns with other dumb beasts, and suddenly the skies go dark. Overhead, something impossibly huge appears. Every creature around you panics and scatters, but you stare upwards in awe. You, the player, can identify it as a spaceship, but at the same time it's so far beyond your realm of experience that it's hard to rationalise it. It completely throws you, but it's a sublime hint as to what's to come.

Space is a bit of a grind at first – cash is a little too hard to come by, but you need huge gobbets of it to afford the really awesome toys. It's going to present quite the obstacle for casual players, who may be so daunted that they stick to tooling around with the various creation tools. Once you're past a few hours of uphill struggle and diligent diplomacy wow gold or destruction, however, you reach Spore's unspoken sixth stage – you become a god. With a click of your mouse, barren planets become verdant wonderlands, the very skies and seas change colour, mountains appear where once were valleys, crystal fields and emerald rivers split the land, species find themselves changed and evolved.

Or, indeed, entire worlds are wiped from existence. For all its enormity, it's where Spore's heritage as a follow-up to the Sims is most evident: you've graduated from making people in your own image to reshaping the entire universe. A universe, critically, that will be endlessly restocked with the creations of friends and strangers.