And don’t get me started on the ‘adventures’ people have made that simply involve you hitting a highly-armoured treasure chest for ten minutes, designed purely so people can grind their experience points up. Sounds great, doesn’t it? At least, it does up until the point where you accept a mission that appears to have been made by an illiterate 12 year-old who couldn’t think of anything more interesting than building a giant bloody maze with a few monsters in it. The adventures themselves are surprisingly varied, thanks in no small part to the fact that they’re treated in the same way as most of the objects in Spore – they can be created by other users and shared over the internet, then shoved into your game at random. The fact that they haven’t been tightened up in any way is a real missed opportunity, never mind the fact that it’s easy for your intrepid space captain to get stuck on bits of scenery.
They’re unresponsive and imprecise, which wasn’t too big an issue in the creature stage, but it becomes a real problem when you’re a space captain trying to fight off about five different enemy monsters at once. The first thing you’ll notice upon attempting your first mission, though, is that it uses the rubbish MMO-esque controls from the game’s ‘creature’ stage.
You can’t just beam down on every planet you come across, of course – you generally take missions from other alien races in an attempt to make them hate you a little less, and they’ll tell you where to go and what to do. So it’s pretty nifty, then, that Galactic Adventures allows you to create a space captain and have him beam down to the planets, carrying out missions and unlocking a bunch of new equipment along the way.
One of the main drawbacks of this stage was that you were forever confined to your spaceship, unable to actually set foot on the hundreds of planets you discovered. Spore: Galactic Adventures is designed to bolt on seamlessly to the main game’s final – and most interesting – stage, where you’re whizzing around the galaxy, colonising planets and waging war against other races. And now we’ve got the first proper expansion pack for it (or the second if you count the Creepy and Cute pack – we’re not sure you should, though). A shame, then, if not a completely unenjoyable one. A classic victim of its own hype, Spore could never really have delivered on all its promises, and what we ended up with was a load of really interesting ideas stuck to a series of rubbish, scaled-down versions of other video games. Hey! Remember Spore? It’s better known as What Will Wright Did After The Sims, it was meant to be the second coming, and it turned out to be… um, pretty good, I guess.
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