Evolution is a long, slow process, and its effects sometimes aren’t noticeable for millions of years. In Spore, we played through the cell stage up to the final moments of the tribal stage as our creature evolved from single-celled organism to fire-wielding biped. Someday we’ll conquer the planet and then the galaxy in the civilization and space stages, but today, we’ll walk you through the first half of Maxis’ hybrid strategy game.

Your first decision is one of the most important and will affect everything down to the design of your spaceship a billion game years in the future: Do you eat meat? Carnivores are more aggressive than their vegetarian cousins in Spore, and the simple act of eating animal cells instead of plant cells will lead species to be more hostile. That said, evolution in Spore is at your fingertips, and one mating call will take you to the cell creator tool, letting you completely reverse the direction of your evolution should your gameplay tastes change.

One day all this will be yours. If you can survive the primordial soup.

Once you decide on your diet, you choose one of several planets to play on. You have the option to begin from any of the five phases, should you want to skip the rather simple cell stage which, in some ways, plays more like a casual downloadable game. Indeed, after a meteor crashes into the ocean, seeding it with life (that’s you), your first and only goal is to survive, swimming about using keyboard controls or the mouse, chomping on floating pieces of red meat, or green plants if you chose to play vegan (we didn’t). With each piece of food you eat, you gain a point on the progress bar and grow slightly in size.

You’re not alone in the primordial soup, however. Other cell creatures are fighting for food as well, and some are a lot bigger than you. To succeed, you have to avoid larger creatures that see you as nothing more than an afternoon snack and go after smaller creatures, many of which are user creations straight out of the Sporepedia. When you take out a competing organism, they will often drop new body parts that are added to the creator tool.

Then, by clicking on the mating call button, you swim up to a friendly cell of the same species--which are now everywhere as you begin to assert your dominance of the primordial soup--and make a baby cell. You can outfit this next generation with any of the body parts you’ve collected. Our new cell transformed from a friendly little guy with a pair of spikes to a poison-spitting, electrocuting ball of doom in just one generation. With significant DNA points and such evolutionary advantages, our cell was now ready to advance to the creature stage.

This stage takes you to an abridged version of the Spore creature creator, already available for $10 for dedicated mad scientists hoping to create the master race. Only this time you have just one evolutionary category to choose from: legs. Attach them to your cell and then crawl forth to land as a smaller fish in a bigger pond, a theme common in each Spore stage. Our creature was outfitted with a poison stinger, two electrical nodes, a few spikes, a pair of eyes, and carnivorous, flesh-ripping beak. After we advanced to the creature stage, a handy timeline popped up displaying each of our new generations and their evolutionary advancements over hundreds of millions of years.

Each stage will introduce an increasing number of strategy elements; the creature stage begins with a land map and home nest. The nest is where you can regain health if injured and recruit clan members of your own species to join you on a hunting party, the humble beginnings of civilization. As a carnivore, the only way to advance is to eat other creatures.

If your critters prefer feasting on fruit instead of their fellows, they’ll lead completely different lives.

Thankfully some of the creatures are much less evolved than you, equipped with only legs and mouths and as easy to eat as an apple on the ground. Most species that you encounter, however, are more advanced than your own, and in these cases it’s not advisable to go in chomping. Instead, change your "stance" from aggressive to friendly, and you’ll open a new batch of diplomacy actions such as sing and dance. Some species are inherently aggressive and will attempt to eat you, forcing you back to the nest to wait for a hundred million years of evolution and growth before you’re strong enough to take them on. Others enjoy a good song and dance and will be impressed by your creatures’ performances. This little minigame is the base of all diplomacy for future generations.