Spore was an all right game.  In my review, I gave it 72%, which if translated to a four out of five, seems rather generous now.  I'd stick with the percentage, but it would probably translate to a three out of five.  Spore Creatures follows on from Spore Origins whereby the original game looks to have been broken up into its five constituent stages and are being ported down for Apple's popular slice of zeitgeist tech.  Where Origins had you bubbling around as a wibbly thing with blobs on, Creatures takes you into what was my favourite stage of the original Spore game, where your species emerges onto land, interacts with other preset creatures by either attacking them or undertaking frankly needless and tiresome tasks revolving largely around moving sets of objects littered throughout the map from within their own reach to directly in front of their nose.

The game feels cumbersome to play since the iPhone port uses the accelerometer to dictate direction and speed, which means that you have to tilt the screen away from you in order to get your creature to scamper due north.  This, of course, is as ridiculous as having to press on the screen to make the little fella follow your finger as in Snake Galaxies, which amusingly obscured your view more-or-less completely.  You can remedy this in part by setting the relative tilt angle, but to get a clearer view, you'd have to angle the screen down as default, which makes even less sense.

The iPhone port affects the game in two unfotunate ways.  One, it is reduced from a fairly lush-looking 3D experience into a rather bland top-down affair with a scattering of pseudo-3D layering effects.  The game looks overly simplistic and more aimed towards the under twelves, which strikes me as a little silly as a twelve-year-old with an iPhone is akin to a toddler with a car insurance policy, but that might just be me.  No, I didn't think so.  The other arrival from the port of despair comes from the clunky customisation of the creature itself.  One of the joys of the original Spore game on PC was that it was infinitely customisable; if you wanted to make a cock-monster, you could make a cock-monster.  In Creatures, you are stuck with an annoying, inflexible bolt-on effort where there are only so many places certain bodily features will fit and since you're not operating in 3D, it doesn't actually matter where you put anything, it doesn't really affect the shape of the creature much at all.

Sound is acceptable, if a little irritating (there's only so long you can listen to samples of emperor penguin calls) and the graphics themselves, taking the lack of 3D out of the picture, are bright, clear and fun.  This truly is a game aimed at the young or hopelessly bored, leading me to say that I really don't feel that it is worth the £3.99 price tag.  It should have stayed on the DS for the interface is far more DS-friendly and the device suits the audience far better.