As you start the game, you'll be playing on a cellular level, and you control a little creature in a pool. Eating any microbes smaller than you, and avoiding the bigger ones, you'll eventually grow up. You can add cilia ("tiny flapping "hairs" that let you move more quickly), flagella ("whiplike projections that also help you move quicky") and defense mechanisms to make avoiding those big bullies a bit easier.

After growing into a multicellular being, you can create your own creature using an editor. Again you have to eat smaller creatures, and flee or fight the bigger ones. You have to score points by eating, and after scoring enough points you can lay an egg and continue. The editor will again show up, and allow you to remove the fins to make it a creature that'll walk to the land.

After reaching the land, you'll encounter other players' creatures. They'll be downloaded by the game from a master server, to which creatures are uploaded once created. The "food web" will determine what creatures to populate the world with:

"[...]so if you create a world that needs a flying carnivore creature to complete itself, the Spore master server will search its own database for a player-created flying meat eater and download it to your world, which, as Wright puts it, will "bring together the best aspects of massively multiplayer games without the restrictions."

Creatures will also have the ability to learn, though you'll have to teach them. There will not be a "best creature," as every one of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. If your creature is large and strong, it'll be slow and might have trouble catching its prey. You can continue to the next stage of the game only by finding another creature of your own species. Again the creature lays an egg, after which you can edit the species, so it evolves even further. New weaponlike features can be added to the body, like a tail stinger.

Eventually a tribe will develop, with primitive huts and features. Again the target is to evolve, by collecting food, eating more, and as you survive and others don't, you'll become stronger as armories are developed. After a while you'll need to develop the city even further. Comparable with the Civilization series, it's time to grow your military and economic forces. You'll need to conquer the planet.

But the planet is not enough. After a lot of research, you'll be able to develop a UFO. With that UFO you can collect resources from around the planet, or transport species from your planet to others in the galaxy. If you drop a creature on a planet where they cannot live, the creature will explode. There should be plenty left on the home planet though. The "hydrocarbon canisters" are a solution, as firing these off at planets will create a breathable atmosphere on the planet. Of course that can be an atmosphere of air, but also of water:

[...]"As Wright pointed out, you might just as well make a race of superintelligent dolphins that live below the sea whose space colonies would instead be filled with water"

You can zoom out even further, and so see other galaxies, again created by other players. That might lead in letting you take on missions of other races, or you could just wipe them all out. The choice is yours.

GameSpot says the game is "incredibly intriguing" and the complex dynamics are "highly intuitive." You can edit anything you like, but you don't have to, due to the procedural systems. The game is scheduled for fall 2006. Of course we'll keep you updated until then - and beyond - but for now you might want to read the full preview.