Customer Reviews for Spore Galactic Adventures

Spore Galactic Adventures
by Electronic Arts

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Video Game Reviews of Spore Galactic Adventures

Customer Review: Fails to clear an already low bar
Summary: 1 Stars

While I was not pleased with the DRM issues of the original Spore, I did install and play the game and found it to be a decent time killer that was good for sporadic play sessions. I "completed" the game with a couple of different creations and would occasionally hop on to expand my empires further. Figuring that most of the annoyances of DRM issues were tied to the core product, I decided I might as well grab the expansion. Unfortunately upon installing Galactic Adventures, I was immediately annoyed. One of the few positives of the original Spore's protections was that the CD wasn't required to be in the drive to play it. So of course, installing GA causes Spore to now require a CD to run. Minor annoyance to be sure, but still, a negative.

The expansion itself can best be described as disappointing. The missions are very simplistic, and the gameplay for them is essentially the same thing as the creature stage. You might have to pick up an item and bring it to someone else, kill some enemies, or talk to some npcs, but it adds very little to the gameplay. I has hoped that the expansion would add a little more depth to the game, but the Maxis designed missions are all pretty basic. And you'll go through the small amount of them quickly, and be left to user designed missions, which as others have noted, are seldom worth playing. They're mostly either designed as jokes, or just poorly designed. Gaining experience is a time tested way to keep people playing repetitive content, but it quickly lost its luster in GA for me. The small amount you can get from user designed adventures doesn't help.

Unfortunately, I haven't found the expansion to add anything of value to the game, and at best is a poor use of money. For me, it's actually kept me from playing Spore at all, as I never feel like digging up the CD to play. The lackluster nature of the expansion has also tempered my interest in the core game. Unfortunately, I doubt you can remove GA without deleting and reinstalling spore (and using up one those installations!), and playing through again just doesn't have much appeal.

Customer Review: Mac Users Beware
Summary: 1 Stars

My sons love the original Spore. I was hoping this expansion pack would bring the fun of the Creature and Tribal stages to the latter part of the game (since Civilization and Space are frankly boring)
I installed GA on my PowerMac and right away I knew there was going to be trouble. Error messages about installer scripts not working properly began to show up. The installer seemed to finish successfully though. Then the kids tried to play the game. It seemed to work in the Captain outfitter stage but as soon as they went on to an adventure CRASH! Over and over. I checked the EA site and it appears there is a patch ... for PC only. I was invited to enter my name on there mailing list so when they eventually decide to get around to fixing this buggy POS (piece of software) they will let me know. Others have had similar issues as noted in the EA forums.

What was supposed to be fun for my kids was instead disappointing and frustrating. My 10 year old even offered to pay ME back for my wasted money because he felt so bad about it. Thanks EA for once again punishing your customers.

Customer Review: Amazing Expansion Pack
Summary: 5 Stars

I'll start with the technical subjects. Firstly, installing this game took a very long time. My dad and I had to re-install the original game, install Galactic Adventures, then get 4 updates, each of which loaded slowly, but things went in general smoothly after that. Although occasionally the game crashes, erasing all progress I haven't yet saved.

Not uncommonly, while playing an adventure, I'll accidently walk my avatar into a something, like a wall, and get stuck. Once you get stuck it's nearly impossible to get out. This glitch is very annoying, because it means the player has got to start the adventure all over again. However, there are lots of good things about this game, too. Making your very own adventures is lots of fun. You can make adventures based on real events! And, of course, you get to play adventures, too! Sometimes adventure's can be quite complicated. Some adventures are super fun. Maxis should make more adventures, though. Since Maxis adventures give your captain 100 points, while non-Maxis one usually give much less. Your captain needs these points to gain new accessories (weapons etc.)

I really like all the great new accessories. You get a wide variety of cool weapons for your captain and some of the friendly accessories are quite fun. Also Galactic Adventures lets you put exo-skeleton limbs on your creatures.

All in all Spore Galactic Adventures is an awesome expansion pack to the original game.

Customer Review: Why "Galactic Adventures" fails.
Summary: 1 Stars

Let me start with singling out the most useful feature of "Galactic Adventures". The rate of eco-disasters drops from approx 1/min (with 5 disasters occurring simultaneously at a time) to 1/4 hours. This is truly a great tweak that allows you to explore the galaxy without having to worry about your empire dying out as soon as you leave your home world. However, this should be is a tiny patch, not an expansion pack. I doubt it was intended, but you need to buy this product to make Spore vanilla playable.

Now, let's look at the main shtick of "Galactic Adventures" - the RPG missions in the Spore universe. The idea is good, may be even great: your creature from the "Creature" stage beams down to the planet and interacts (woos/kills) other creatures. Completed adventures give you experience points, and when you level up, you get a choice to buy a new accessory (death ray/special pretty pose) for your avatar. When I first saw this I was stunned - that was exactly what had been needed to bring Spore to life.

Then, the disappointment set in. Maxis created just over a dozen of adventures; the rest was left to users. The reasoning was: users create great creatures/vehicles/buildings, let's rely on them creating adventures themselves too. Here's why this doesn't work: when you design a new critter or a spaceship, you only choose its looks since the stats system is rudimentary in creatures and nonexistent in ships. With adventure design, on the other hand, you create gameplay. And, as Maxis should have known, users are bad level designers. Little Big Planet had a few gems in oceans of garbage; "Galactic Adventures" seems to follow the same tendencies. Users just don't contribute enough effort into creating good levels; that's what Maxis employees are supposed to be doing.
To make it worse, Maxis adventures award you with 100xp each; while user generated ones only give you 10xp. So, to get that new death ray, you will be stuck doing one mess of an adventure after another, after another (it may go into the hundreds for higher levels).

Maxis planned to work on creating more adventures after the release, but their Sporepedia page is virtually empty, save for one imposter who figured out that he can get his adventures into it by calling himself "the Maxis".

To sum it up - "Galactic Adventure" doesn't have many worthwhile adventures in it. The only reason to buy it is to get some tweaks for the Spore vanilla game, but this can, probably, be done just by messing with the config files.

Useless