The first few hours of any Spore playthrough are fun as you progress from a single-celled organism to a pack of pre-sentient animals to a stone age tribe to a nation state to an interplanetary empire. However, once you've expanded a bit into space the game grinds to a halt as your single spaceship has to manage the economy and defense of your entire interplanetary empire. Forget crushing your enemies with a huge fleet or drowning in money from controlling sources of valuable spice. If you want to defend against pirates or invaders you have to do it yourself. If you want to make money you have to ship the spice yourself. If you want to explore the galaxy you have to do it yourself. And you want to do all those things, meaning you end up doing none of them once your empire reaches a certain size. Spore had a lot of potential, but it's sad that the most fun stages are the first four which are over in a flash and the least fun stage is the last which can go on forever.
