Spore: Galactic Adventures - Teasing or Pleasing?

When Spore came out last year, I think it's fair to say the reaction to the game was pretty meh compared to the hype.

Personally, I enjoyed it as a creative sandbox for dicking around, but I can understand how some people who had been hoping for a more robust game experience may have felt cheated by the simplistic gameplay.



The first expansion pack, Cute and Creepy, was basically just a bucket of Mister Potato Head parts. There were some neat additions, but nothing that really changed the way the game played.

There was also a free patch that fixed some of the broken gameplay in the space stage, added new types of planets, and added exoskeleton limbs (yay?). Again, this was all well and good, but didn't really change the game in any significant way.

Now comes Galactic Adventures, the first true expansion. Galactic Adventures adds all new missions to the space stage. For the first time it allows you to get out of your ship by beaming down to a planet so you can actually interact with the world. It looks like your creatures gets a jetpack or jump boots to get around, and you can outfit it with weapons that have different effects on enemies.

But the coolest part of the expansion is that it includes a mission editor that allows you to create and share your own missions. Part of this is a planet editor that lets you edit entire planets and populate them with stuff from your Sporepedia. This has me pretty excited. I don't know if it will have the depth of Little Big Planet's editor (probably not), but it seems like it will be a lot of fun to play with.

Is anyone else looking forward to this add-on? Did you have strong feelings one way or another about the original? Do you feel like this expansion is going to underdeliver?

Check out the trailers below if you're curious what Galactic Adventures adds.

Oh - If you want to trade penis monsters, my Spore ID is Secretcow. What's yours?