This game creates the only friends I have....

An asteroid hurdles through space, speeding past alien spacecraft who follow it, attempting to scan it for any life. Within seconds, the asteroid is out of sight, and enters the orbit of a planet. Catching fire, it slams into the ground, creating a crater from the impact. Hundreds of small fragments explode from the asteroid, scattering themselves around the planet. Some land by cities of sophisticated, lizard-like beigns, others by curious tribes who begin worshipping the fiery rocks, and by clueless creatures who poke and lick them. One particular fragment lands in a small pool of water, and you crawl out - a small, slithery cell who's main goal is to survive.
This is Spore, the tale of how your microscopic race can go from scavengers getting enough food to barely survive, to a thriving empire that controls the entire galaxy. The game is based on five stages: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Cell station is where your journey begins. There is little customization in this stage, except for the basic shape of your cell and organelles. Once you become the top of the food chain, you evolve legs. Stumbling onto land, you enter the Creature Stage.
Here is where the true customization takes place. You can collect various parts from skeletons scattered around the planet and add them to your creature. You can make a huge, strong behemoth who crushes his enemies with his gigantic claws, or a small, nimble beign that flies and steals food from his enemies before they notice he is there. You can create your creature based on your species' diet: omnivore, carnivore, or herbivore. Besides the customization, Creature Stage introduces a huge skill in the game that is incredibly useful - friends and foes.
You can choose whether to impress other races and become friends, or attempt to destroy and annhilate them. You have to be wise as to who you attack and who you ally; making enemies with all the weak creatures could end up with them evolving into way stronger creatures and destroying YOU. Once your brain has increased, your species can begin laying out the foundations for a tribe. Here is where the friends and foes system comes into major effect. To complete the Tribal Stage and become a civilization, you must complete your Tribe Totem Pole. For every tribe you defeat or ally, a new totem is added. This stage goes by rather fast, and prepares you for Civilizational Stage.
Civilization Stage takes inspiration from Sid Meier's Civilization series. Your goal is to control every city on the planet, whether through religious, economic, or military means. Religious races can convert the race into believing your civilization is their leader, and is considered the easiest way to complete the stage. Military is just brute force; when it comes to the guns in this, size DOES matter. Economic is peaceful; you start a trade route with a friendly city and eventually buy their city from them. This takes longer than the other two ways but can be very helpful in the long run.
Once you control the planet, you can launch a space project, starting the Space Stage, which is endless. All the choices you've made in the previous stages add up to decide what class you are in the Space Stage - perhaps a battle-crazed tyrant, or a religious zealot out to convert everyone to the teachings of Spode. During the stage, your goal is to go from the Captain of your Space Project to the Omnipotent Beign of the Universe. On the way, you'll encounter the Grox - a cyborg race who hate all and arguably are the antagonists of the game. (If hours of work are put into it, you could make them your ally- if you ever do, I commend you for your bravery.) Between space pirates, colonizing other planets, upgrading your fleet, and stabalizing your funds, this is by far my favorite stage. Overall, this is a great game for creative people and truly lets your imagination soar.

Graphics: 16/20
Story: 17/20
Gameplay: 20/20
Replayability: 19/20
Soundtrack: 18/20
Overall: 90/100

The game itself?
It's great. Inventive, addictive and has a unique charm. Generally I would agree with pretty much all the good reviews about this game in terms of gameplay.

So what's the issue?
The issue is that, due to what I can only consider to be bad coding and the usual lazy disregard EA has toward its customers, the game is broken. No I'm not just one of those people who gives a bad review because I've had an error which I'm too ignorant to find a fix for, I mean the game suffers from severe issues among a very large percentage of its players and if you won't take my word for it just do a quick google search for 'Black screen Spore has stopped working'.
I've spent many days searching around trying this and that fix and, like everone else who's Spore unpredictably crashes to desktop, all fixes are TEMPORARY.

What I've found out is that Spore has a strange habit of spontaneously corrupting your saves, which is the cause of most crashes. This can destroy hours of game time if you forget to save as there are no autosaves except for when you pass between one of the 5 stages of evolution in the game.
Once your save is corrupt, that's it. You can force yourself to continue in fear of persistent crashes to desktop (whether it's after 30 seconds or 30 minutes) or you can start a new game, knowing that it WILL become corrupt whether it takes 1 game session or 20 game sessions.
For some people this problem goes as far as preventing them from even starting Spore at all. For every user having this issue including myself, the suggested fixes (uninstall, reinstall, updating drivers, various ways of fiddling around with game files and computer performance) might work for a day, might work for a week, but your saves WILL become corrupt again.

This has NOTHING to do with specs being too low, people whose specs far exceed the needs of the game have these problems just as often. THERE IS A FAIR PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T HAD THESE PROBLEMS, so take the risk if you want. But it's a coin flip.

Despite this being such a widespread fault affecting both Steam and non-Steam versions there has been no official response from EA or Maxis, nor any attempt to fix it. This game in its current state should not be for sale and advertised as a complete game and, given how old it is, it's unlikely that there will ever be a fix released (plus because it's EA).

i bought this for £20 and it went on sale for £5 the next day jesus christ why

You kiddong me.... It took some years to get it down to -75%. I bought it for full prise, even the DLCs! But it was still worth it, super fun with the DLCs! Good game :)

hankikaa :D