Will Wright was the mastermind behind The Sims, the best selling computer game of all time. So naturally, his next big project was going to cause quite a stir in the gaming fraternity. Spore is another life simulation, but of a very different kind. This time you really play God, creating a life form and evolving it from primordial soup to seasoned space traveller.

Spore is broken down into five distinct stages. After customising the appearance of your creature (body shape, number of limbs, eyes, colouration and so on), the game begins at the cell stage where you swim around in the pond of life trying not to get eaten by the bigger inhabitants. Carnivorous creatures have to hunt others to grow, whereas veggies munch on plant life.

Although the gameplay is very basic, requiring only left-clicking to move around, the environment is lusciously rendered with weird and wonderful brightly-coloured fish and squid-like entities aplenty. Swimming over food and gulping it down fattens up your creature and also gives you the chance to grow new bits such as a thick tail to swim faster or glands that spew poisonous ink to deter predators.

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Eventually you'll grow a pair of legs and venture out of the water and onto the 3D landscape in stage two. This introduces a social aspect, as you meet other groups of creatures and try to befriend them by dancing, singing and generally showing off to each other. Well, either that or you beat them around the head with your upgraded claws and have them for dinner. The choice of diplomacy or war is yours, but either way you earn DNA points to buy body part upgrades.

Matters get a touch more involved in the third stage, where your creature forms a tribe. Here Spore becomes like a very basic RTS where villagers are used to gather food by fishing or hunting, or they're turned into warriors or musicians. Again, the player can take the warrior route and beat up neighbouring tribes, or the social stance by playing funky music to win them over.

Up to this point it's all pretty superficial fun, albeit snazzily rendered with some really cute attention to detail. Watching a group of creatures react to a sudden meteor storm is highly entertaining, as is merely listening to your tribe chatter amongst themselves. More hardcore gamers may balk at the lack of depth to these early stages, but they don't last for all that long and are really more of a warm-up to the final two sections.

Stage four is the civilization era, although don't expect it to turn into a Meier-esque heavyweight strategy game. This part of the game is about city building and resource gathering, although there's only one resource - the spice (someone's been reading too much Frank Herbert) - and town management is a simple affair.

There's more challenge because the other tribes are more aggressive here, and if you piddle about placing decorative trees and fountains around your city hall, it won't be long before a war-oriented civilization has developed planes and is showering you with bombs. In response you can build your own land, naval and airborne vehicles, designing them from scratch with varying stats for health, attack power and speed.

This is the creative aspect of Spore. Buildings can be constructed from scratch as well as vehicles, and hours can be spent tinkering with the exact appearance, paint jobs and stats of these inventions. And it's oh-so satisfying to see the fruits of your ingenuity rolling around the battlefield and blasting the opposition to bits. Other players can access your creations online (and vice-versa).

As with the previous stages, combat isn't the only way forward, the alternative being economic and diplomatic advancement. You'll still need an army to defend the spice fields that need to be held to bring in revenue, mind you, but once the dosh is rolling in (multiplied by factory buildings) it's easy to buy allies by lavishly splashing some cash in their direction. Overall this stage is a basic but streamlined and enjoyable model of a strategy game, with some commendable unit AI (for example, tanks will automatically attack the biggest threat targets).

Spore really revs up into a more open-ended game in the final space stage. There are far more decisions to be made here: do you conquer the galaxy by setting up trade routes and buying out other planets? Or explore the vast universe, trying to solve the enigmatic main quest while picking up long-lost artifacts that can be flogged on the market for big sums of money? Dosh that could be spent to enlist the favour of allies, as with the previous stage.

Then there's planet colonisation, whereby terraforming tools can be used to make hostile worlds habitable, allowing the player to establish spice mining colonies to grow the economy. Perhaps you'd prefer to be a trader, shuttling spice around and finding the best prices. Or maybe performing missions for alien races is the way to persuade them to become allies. There are loads of options and achievement awards to collect, which unlock new tools and equipment to purchase. It's a vast universe out there and developing your empire is hugely entertaining.

So are there any major flaws? Not really. The controls for space battles are a little fiddly, as is the 3D camera in the middle stages of the game, but you'll be having too much fun to worry about this much. And the beauty of it all is that the replay value is high. For example, once you've played as a war-mongering carnivore, you can try a herbivore, perhaps slap some wings on and see how it feels to fly.

Is Spore the next Sims? It's too early to say, but it's a definite winner. It'll be popular because it's cute, highly replayable and just plain fun, not to mention being very friendly towards the casual gamer. The final space stage possesses a surprising amount of depth, too, once you really get into it.