Spore, release date announced

[Kevin]

You can, at least in the creature stage. Just don't push the button in the lower right and you can keep playing forever.

Overall, I'm really not impressed with the game. All of the stages are too short, except for space. The default controls are horrible, and apparently you can't change them (at least that I saw). I got to space on my first sitting with the game, and haven't really played it since, except for the creature stage. There is just no depth to the game.

I'm kinda in the same boat as you. Though I've played a few more times with some of the stuff in space and have had some fun with it.

I do like the creature stage a fair bit though and I might have to see if I can kill an epic creature on that stage one of these days. :)

The RTS parts are pretty meh. The interface is poor and the controls are non intuitive.

Space for me was not really a saving grace either. It's got some fun stuff, but I'm more engaged by other galactic conquest games. I've made some alliances bought some planets conquered some others, done a bit of terraforming (still getting the hang of that and honestly don't have all the tools for it yet). But the space interface is bugging me and I have to be missing something. The hoping from planet to planet to get to the one you want because I don't have the range to get there bugs me a bit. I really want a quick way to get in and out of the solar system and in and out of planetary orbit.

I don't see increasing the difficulty making the game more fun either, it looks like it will just make it more frustrating since there doesn't seem to be a ton of strat to it anyway. The choices you make in earlier stages don't seem to have as much impact on the rest of the game as I'd like. That is good and bad in that you can easily make purely cosmetic choices for your creature and get through all the stages, it makes it harder to gimp yourself if you will, but it also means that you don't feel like what you did really mattered. Ah well.

I think my biggest problem is that it plays a lot like a console game but isn't on a console. The controls just don't fit me.

I'd give it about 65 / 100. It provides some entertainment, and if you like the space part of the game (which appears to be 90% of the game) you'll like it more than me. Again, this is a bit early review as I'm not that deep into the space part of the game. But all that work I put into building my creature seems lost since all I ever see now is my space ship. I want ground troops, I want to be that epic creature I saw running around when I was in early stages so that I can stomp around on other little creatures. :) I want to potentially "go back stages". Play "God" by being a space fairing race that can take over and guide the evolution of creatures in the earlier stages of the game (i.e. go back and play those stages again). You can kinda do some of that because it will use stuff you made in other games, but it's not quite what I want.