or those who may have missed it, Spore is an ambitious blend of life form evolution and user-created content. Players take their species from single-celled organism all the way through to spacefaring civilization, as their universe becomes populated with creatures, vehicles and buildings imported via the Sporepedia, the online catalog that holds all content made by other players.
Your previously unseen ship captain
is now a unique character.A year after the game's 2008 release, EA pushes the limits of user-generated experiences again with the release of Spore Galactic Adventures, the first true expansion for the game that adds substantial new content beyond extra creature parts. Taking cues from games like LittleBigPlanet, players can now create their own levels or "adventures" as well as playing other peoples'. These away-team style missions seamlessly integrate into the space stage of the game, essentially adding a new array of planet bound missions to accompany the pre-existing space quests.
If you're the sort of person who spent a lot of time and effort designing vehicles and buildings in the original Spore, there's a good chance that creating missions in Galactic Adventures will suck up many more hours of your life. Though level creators in other games can often be intimidating and impenetrable, Galactic Adventures is easy to use and surprisingly deep. Assigning objectives forms the backbone of your mission, which can be created from combinations of eleven simple goal types such as move to, talk to, kill and give.
While this may sound pretty basic, chaining together several of these can create quest chains, and each adventure can have up to six acts to allow for lengthier missions as well as changing environments and situations. Other than these restrictions, the only limit is your imagination, with the theme, environment, design and characters of your level completely in your hands.
All of Spore's user-created elements really shine here, with the back catalog of creatures, buildings and vehicles suddenly proving to be more directly useful than ever before. For example, if you had a bunch of Star Wars-themed creations in your game, you could already be sitting on the fundamentals to recreate the Ewok vs. Stormtrooper forest battle from Return of the Jedi. Since people have been making content for over a year for the original Spore, there are mountains of premade elements ready for you to use should you choose to not design absolutely everything yourself.
To add further incentive to playing and completing missions, your previously unseen ship captain is now a unique character that can be equipped with new science fiction inspired weapons and accessories. As you gain levels through completing adventures you can be outfitted with anything from stat-boosting armors to items that grant you completely new abilities like laser weapons for offensive quests.
At the time of writing, there appears to be an abundance of battle-focused adventures available on the Sporepedia, so it can be hard to find many doable missions if your created species is a peaceful or social one. Also, it seems like most are designed for the more functional species, so you probably want to make sure your race at least has hands for grasping and legs for jumping before entering the space stage. Of course, part of the beauty here is that if you aren't satisfied with the missions out there you can always try to your hand at making better ones yourself.
What the heck are these maracas
good for? Build missions
from simple goals.Much like the base game of Spore, most of Galactic Adventures' problems seem to be due to the fact there are so many potential variables in the game. In having to cater for every possible creature combination, certain problems arose specifically in the creature stage such as clipping and less responsive controls than you'd expect from a standard third-person game. Since the adventure mode is heavily based on that stage, most of those issues return, but this time more pronounced given some of the more complicated abilities of your captain such as targeting ranged weaponry.
Also, there will be times that you stumble into adventures that are unfinished, broken or just badly designed which can hinder both your enjoyment and the illusion of a believable, persistent universe. Some people may also take issue with the fact that the developers chose to enhance the space phase of the game instead of one of the weaker tribal and civilisation stages. Still, the new adventures do help add more variety to what was by far and away the lengthiest phase of the game, and besides we can always hope for such improvements in future releases.
Other than the Galactic Adventure mode and creator, there is literally no other content in this expansion pack, so if adding and creating away-team style missions in Spore doesn't pique your interest, there's nothing really here for you. But if you're the type of person who enjoys crafting worlds and/or levels in games like The Sims and LittleBigPlanet, Galactic Adventures is absolutely worth adding to your copy of Spore.
MATTEUS BOBO