Well, it's better than Star Trek Online - Spore: Galactic Adventures

When we were about six or seven years old, my brother and I had this crazy daydream about a computer program, which would let you create your own games. You'd get to decide what the main character and the baddies look like, whether you're supposed to shoot stuff or whether you jump and run - you get the idea. In a way, the Spore expansion is that kind of program - within modest limitations.

To get your Galactic Adventures started, you need to have a space age Spore creature ready. If you haven't played the original game until that age, Galactic Adventures will let you download a captain, provide one with some of the missions and even allow you to create one from scratch.
This is probably the addon's most important feature! In the original game, you'd only control your own critter until the beginning of the tribal stage. That's where players start issuing orders to ant-sized tribal minions and the original charm of jumping and running around whilst controlling your own creation never comes back.

When you start on an adventure, you will once again assume control of your favourite creature, interact with all sorts of freaky aliens, socialize, fight, solve puzzles and so forth. And since these adventures are almost exclusively user-generated, over 95% of them are exactly as bad, stupid, broken and frustrating as you'd expect. It's the small amount of real gems (by 'small' I'm still talking thousands!), as well as the possibility to create and share your own adventures, which make Galactic Adventures so much fun.

The easiest way to access the really good stuff is by sorting them with the game's search feature. List the most popular adventures and that's 2000 brilliant little games right there. Pick one that looks good to you, select your captain and off you go!
Most of the user-generated stuff plays a lot like those Java-based browser games you play while you're supposed to work, meaning they take anything from 1-5 minutes to beat. However, there are adventures far more complex and much lengthier than that. One of them is Saving Private Raymond. I'll let you figure out the movie reference.

Saving Private Raymond

The whole thing starts with your captain landing at a beach, tanks and soldiers shooting and getting blown up left and right. One of them orders you to blow up tank barriers, so you grab some grenades and blow them to bits. Once you're done, an allied tank will make its way across the beach, destroy the enemy defense lines and you move on from there. After helping various other soldiers you get to tip-toe around a minefield to pick up a spade, which is required to free the tank after it got stuck. Then you team up with a handful of soldiers, fighting back enemies before they blow up your tank with their rocket launchers. Of course you shouldn't expect Call of Duty here, but the level of complexity is pretty amazing and the mission design is clever and really fun.

In another adventure your captain might get swallowed by a giant alien and you have to get out through its digestive system before you get... well, digested. Can you guess which exit you're gonna use?
One mission has you running around a Mario Kart race track, where you have to beat all the popular racers whilst collecting a lot of coins, which are scattered everywhere across the tracks. Or how about surviving a meteor shower, where hundreds of giant meteors fall out of the sky, squishing you in a single hit if you get too close?

Holy fuck, it's Frogger!

Difficulty varies a lot depending on your creature's abilities and skills. Some creatures have powerful bite and claw attacks, which are great when fighting your way through an ancient coliseum. Other creatures are excellent runners or even know how to fly, which is useful during platforming adventures. But fret not - even a modest warrior, athlete or dancer can enhance their abilities through Spore points (aka experience). Each adventure awards you some points when you beat them, granting you level ups and new tools as you get more and more experienced. A jet pack makes life that much easier for captains without wings, a lightsaber helps herbivore creatures pack a little extra punch in the heat of battle and energy shields will prevent you from taking too much damage.

The amount of points rewarded per adventure is calculated by how many people have played it before you and how many times they have failed. If a mission is complex and difficult to beat, meaning it may take you several attempts to get through, you will be rewarded a nice sum of points. If players just breeze through in under five minutes without failing, your reward will be very little. It's an intelligent system, which prevents players from creating insta-finish adventures to rack up tons of points with zero effort.

Bounce around the platforms and collect the tokens - but avoid the mines!

All excitement aside, Galactic Adventures does have its annoying flaws. Once you install it, the expansion firmly integrates itself into Spore's space age mode. Which is generally a good thing - instead of always telling you to beam up random cows, shoot infected villagers or do other dull, boring space crap aboard your starship all the time, you will be sent on a whole lot of galactic adventures, most of which are user-generated. And that's where the problems begin.

When you start Galactic Adventures from the main menu, rather than randomly accessing them through space age, you get to hand-pick your missions, sort them by difficulty, popularity and so on. In space age, however, the game will force you through any random user-generated crap it can find at that time. And that stuff is so unbelievably bad, broken and downright stupid, it's absolutely not enjoyable. You'll get missions with no descriptions, quest texts saying "wtf lol" and if you force yourself through this kind of garbage, you will not even get any useful points out of it. And that's sad, because these problems could easily be avoided with a filter in the options menu - if you could set the game to only do interactice mission downloads, when the adventure has a certain minimum populariy, you'd get rid of the biggest part of the shitty missions just like that.

Other problems lie within the adventure creator itself. While it is relatively easy to create playable missions with the provided editing tools and there is little to no knowledge required, some people will be put off by the amounts of patience and time required in order to create something really enjoyable. And even if you don't mind a fair bit of trial and error and plenty of test runs in order to create your very own masterpiece, you might find yourself having to tone down the depth of your epic quest to match the editor's limited capabilities.

Gavitonga Racing - reach the finish line before the other racers!

Playability will almost always be a bit of a problem - some characters are bigger than others, some fly, some run really fast and so forth. An adventure, which may pose no problem to your captain might have another player get stuck in the scenery, some might break the whole thing by using abilities you don't have and others might be unable to finish the adventure altogether, because they just don't have the required combat skills or social abilities. It isn't perfect, but with thousands of adventures to choose from, skipping the occasional problematic one for one that actually works is a minor issue.

You need to feel a certain amount of fascination with the Spore universe and your creatures to fully appreciate this expansion. It's incredibly fun to steer a self-made character through hundreds of adventures, fight, dance, chat and solve puzzles as you interact with an infinite amount of alien life forms. It's even better once you start unlocking cool new weapons and abilities, which make future adventures that much easier. If Spore's high level of customization does not appeal to you, however, and you really just want to play to kill some time, then Galactic Adventures isn't worth your money.

It's awesome to see how people recreate games like Frogger or Mario Kart within Spore and when everything works the way it should, these adventures can be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, they're just not very good. If you care about your Spore creature, you won't care if buildings have blurred, ugly textures or how the controls can be a little poor at times. You put up with it, because you want to watch your character evolve and succeed. But if you just want to play, then those little flaws and hiccups, messy graphics, animations and controls, inconsistent difficulty and adventure quality will be more than enough to put you off.

If you miss Spore's original creature stage and you just want some extra depth for your game, go get the expansion. Otherwise, stay away. You're not missing out.

-Cat