Alright, I admit it. I pirated it yesterday. I needed to see if my most anticipated game for the last 3 years was going to be another shitfest. I've been burned too many times in the past (The Sims Online, Master of Orion 3, Simcity Societies, that stupid Revolution game) to simply trust reviews or buy it blindly. Especially for a game as long-developed as Spore.
That being said, I'll be buying it as soon as I get off work next week.
I downloaded Spore at 1 pm yesterday. I stopped playing at 3am this morning.
It's full of polish and charm (the cut-scenes are adorable, Iv'e laughed out loud plenty of times). There is a LOT of detail going on, which is surprising. Space is immense, beautiful, and truly awe-inspiring.
Protip:
SAVE OFTEN. I've had to restart three times due to a graphical glitch, an alt-tab crash, and a system hangup at a loading screen. Spore doesn't have an auto-save that I can see, so you can easily spend 5-6 hours going from cell to space and then lose it all.
Anyone with an ounce of creative spark is going to have a joygasm over this. Everything is player-generated, minus the plants (I suspect they'll become editable after an expansion or something, I'm sure). I didn't get to see any stuff "from the wild", as my pirated copy isn't allowed to go online. Maxis still ships with about 4 gigs of content though, and I've yet to see anything repeat.
All of the stages up to and including about a quarter of the space stage is basically an extended tutorial. Space is where it's at. It's a bit annoying sometimes, especially if you get into a war against someone - they have an infinite supply of ships, you have one at a time.
It runs great on my 2 year old rig (had to turn off depth of field and some shadows).
The creative tools are about as intuitive as you can get. If
SL's tools were half as advanced as these you wouldn't ever see shitty builds. Everything is built just like the creatures.
The music is nice, although sometimes I wish I could pull some of the melodies or something to mp3 because some of them are awesome. It's all procedurally generated, meaning the music responds to what you do on-screen. It's like Rez, except very subtle.
Uh, what else. Lots of achievements to get, lots of unlockables (I don't have even a quarter of the unlockable stuff in space), tons of replay value. Your actions in previous modes determine your creature in later modes. So if you focused on peace in the tribal stage you'll be either religious or economic in the civilization mode, etc.
In short, I'll be first in line to buy this when it comes into town. You should too.