SPORE

Tribal Phase
Marginally more interesting than watching paint dry. There's only three things to do: Collect food, ally with tribes (by playing music), or kill tribes (by stabbing their faces). The whole phase can be beaten by collecting food to fill your village and going to a tribe and not being an idiot when attacking them (focus fire). Kill one tribe, replace losses, move to next tribe. You can befriend other species by playing music which is almost as easy unless the other species innately hates yours (which they tend to do for me) since you have to bribe them with food. I just stuck with spears in faces to get out of this snorefest.

The best part is giving your species a Fez to wear. Besides clothing there's no other customization. You can choose what huts go in your village but you can replace huts at will with no cost so all you have to do is plop down a hut, send guys in to pick up the tool the hut provides, and replace the hut. You can only 'expand' by killing/befriending other species which gives you extra guys to work with, but still only one hut. Clothing does affect your species stats but besides the Fez (which gives Social boost which I never used) I gave my guys squat and still steamrolled everything.

Oh, and you need to make sure your guys are properly fed too which is handled like a trainwreck.


Civ Phase
I already bitched about the vehicle editor, so here's a quick recap:
- Vehicle stat proportions are the only thing that matter. They will always act the same way no matter how they look besides proportions
- Vehicles will always cost the same based on their type, not on their desgin
- Ships have insane range

The most important thing is how you design your cities, which is actually marginally intersting! You have three structures: House, Factory, and Entertainment. House gives you extra units, Factories give $$$ but produce unhappiness, and Entertainment gives happiness. The effect of buildings is also how they're setup next to each other: If a link is formed between a house and a factory (they're next to each other), the link gives you $$$. A link between two factories gives nothing though. This is neat for a while but any strategy here degenerates later on. Since you can also make money on Spice vents (at no cost besides having to control them) its easy to spam hosues so you can build more vehicles. Once I had half the cities I had enough money to simply spam vehicles on the fast track to victory, making factories and entertainment buildings useless.

Also how you design buildings doesn't matter besides how they look.

The goal is to control every city. There's two ways to do it:
- Buy them
- Take them over
You only really get one choice though. To buy cities, you need to trade with them and use trading vehicles. To take them over, you need vehicles to blow shit up. You can only build one kind of vehicle, and that's based on how you ended your Tribal phase. You also get super powers based on your vehicle type which are basically "Spend x $$$ and win if you control y+ cities". I guess its something but by the time I could use any of them I had already pretty much won thanks to the y+ cities requirement.

There is the third type besides Economical and Military: Religious. Its the same as military though, but you shoot beams of religion instead of death.


Space Phase
There's a million distractions, and I don't mean the good kind. Every five minutes there's a chance that one of your planets will be attacked by pirates, a planet will be attacked by someone who doesn't like you, or be under threat of a biological disaster. Who's going to deal with these problems? Why, you of course! You are the only ship in your entire empire. You can ignore these warnings with some penalty (lost spice, lost planet, lower terascore/lost buidling+colony capacity) but its going to be hard to make money when you have no planets worth a damn, if at all. Its money that makes the galaxy go 'round, or more importantly, to buy new abilities for your ship so you can do more than fly/shoot shit lasers/abduct+drop things. Also if you get any allies they'll have the same problems and ask YOU to solve them and they get mad if they do.

Short version: Empires and allies are worth spit. Each one will be another distraction that you have to ignore (and suffer) or deal with it. I can't believe its a game where you can build an empire and then the game punishes you for it. There are defenses against these problems, but some only delay the inevitiable and you have to unlock them. Allies can lend you ships (since you only have one until you die) but they are absolute garbage and will die. Oh and your allies will get pissed at that too.

Every ability you can use besides the scanner and abduction beam needs to be unlocked. It doesn't matter if you have the money for it but without the proper Badge you can't buy it. Each Badge is unlocked by doing specific things, like placing colony buildings, starting wars, or helping your allies.

How about money? You can make it by trading spice (buying it from other species or taking the harvest on your empire's planets) or doing missions for other races (which also makes them like you more). Doing mission is basically putting a FedEx sticker on your spaceship and picking up and delivering shit between planets or scanning the flora on a planet. Sounds exciting huh? There's also the aforementioned spice trading which is rediculous. A good colony with a spice storage (double spice capacity) will be filled to capacity after 5-10 minutes. Once you get 6 colonies you will never be able to properly shift all your excess spice because once again you are the only ship in your entire empire. Only you can trade spice and make money off of it. Trade routes don't give you anything (besides opening up the option to buy the planet the trade route is with). There is no point in having a big empire with lots of colonies because the benefit from them (spice) is completely negated because you can't shift it fast enough.

Attacking enemy empires is fustrating. You can't fight except when you're zoomed in on a planet. So when you're flying between solar systems or planets you are completely helpless. Only you. AI ships can fly around and shoot at shit while you are zooming in on a planet so you can defend yourself. Ally ships can defend you (until they inevitiebly get shot down) at least. Once you're on a planet you win by shooting colonies until a bar fills up when you can capture the system or just burn the colony to the ground (if you get the option, you don't always get one and the colony just burns) while being attacked by enemy ships. Fighting enemy ships is mostly futile, the strong ones leave when you kill all the cities on a planet so you just go for cities. You can easily outrun them (they move slowly and you are always at top speed, there's no upgrades for it) so flying around and dropping bombs or laser-ing cities is generally the best way to do it. If you do fight enemy ships, the strong ones will run away after taking damage, and I do mean run. They'll move almost as fast as your ship (why they don't always move at this speed is beyond me) and the only weapon effective against them here is the laser; Missiles for some reason ignore momentum and start off with no initial speed no matter how you're moving and they're slowing than the escaping ships. If you don't kill the escaping ship fast enough, it'll recover its health to full (which you can't interrupt if it starts).

You can use terraforming tools on planets to ruin them to hell though. Reduce the terrascore of the planet and cities will vanish, building dissapear, and therefore become easier to capture. Or you can planetbuster them but you'll piss off everyone in doing so.

Once again how you make your spaceship doesn't affect it. I guess it really doesn't matter at this point, and besides seeing a Space Invader in Tribal mode was awesome.