Swedish site Game Reactor has footage up of some of the various stages of Spore.

Here’s the creature stage, the tribal stage and the civilization stage. The video for the space travel stage goes up tomorrow.

It looks a little overly simple to me, but still more game-like than what I was expecting. Will Wright’s previous project, The Sims 2, succeeded wildly without having any real goals or competition. It’s more of a dollhouse simulator than anything else.

By contrast, the civ stage is very much a real-time strategy game, if not a particularly deep one. Your little guys have to go out and conquer the world, by gum, whether it’s religiously, militarily or economically.

It’s difficult to say exactly how deep the game is going to be just from the videos, but their example of complex gameplay in the creature phase, hit and run attacks, doesn’t seem very complex at all.

I still expect Spore to succeed on the same level that The Sims did and become one of EA’s flagship products. Heck, I know I’ll be buying it. I bought the Creature Creator, and that isn’t even a game. Will Wright has a knack for making games that interest the hardcore while being accessible to that filthy, filthy casual market.

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