From what I read in the magazines only the first part of the game is sort of a mini game.
1) You are a one cell organism floating around in the small evolution pit (in german it's called Ur-Suppe
) and you are supposed to catch DNA fragments while avoiding other enemy species. I'm pretty sure that this is only a very short part of the game, no one would like to play that for days
2) Then you can create your first evolved creature which crawls on land, find a female/male, make babies and protect your young ones. Interaction is also a part here. This is a little similar to the Sims
3)Then you create a small group/pack and need to feed and develop them further. This part should be similar to the settler games
4) Now comes the civilisation part, guess what, you need to build up an entire planetary civilisation
5) Now comes the last , the biggest and endless part of the game. Now you can build space ships and conquer other worlds, so it will be a little like Imperium galactica
I think that this is a genius attempt of mixing gameplays together and can make you busy for weeks when you see your little tamagochi's make their evolution. Of course the creation of such a game is very risky and quite a lot can go wrong, but from what I see it looks good (alone the creature editor allows everything, you can even put the mouth on the back)
If your creature will be able to develop further this way is another matter