User-generated content has become quite the craze among gamers, especially as it's no longer reserved for just the modding community. It has reached the point where the entire purpose of a game can be for players to create whatever they want using the tools provided, allowing them to continuously dream up new experiences that they can then share with gamers around the world. Spore was one of the forerunners of this new generation of "create 'em ups", and, coming from visionary producer Will Wright (of The Sims fame), it was no surprise when its charm and simplicity successfully defined the essence of the genre last year. Although Spore's various elements perhaps failed to stand up on their own, the entire bundle made for a fun and unique experience; and now, thanks to its latest expansion - Galactic Adventures - its universe just got bigger!

Galactic Adventures introduces new gameplay modes beyond the final Space Phase, giving the game a little more length beyond its original limited lifespan. Galactic Adventures provides you with an all-new editor with which you can create your own missions and then share them with the Spore community. These focus upon the adventures of the captains of the space-faring species that have evolved from the ooze in the previous instalment. No longer confined to his ship, your captain can beam down to planets in order to rescue locals, do battle in alien combat arenas and woo every green alien woman in sight - it's like having your own pet Captain Kirk!

Galactic Adventures begins with a trip to a little place called Adventure Town, a brief tutorial stage that brings you up to speed on how the new adventures work - and despite the incredibly irritating music, it does a good job of introducing what the adventures are all about. Before embarking upon your intrepid journey however, you need to choose a stock captain from the Sporepedia (a catalogue of user created content) or build one from scratch via the Creature Creator. Once you're ready, you can beam down to the planet surface, where playing as your captain is similar to the mechanic found in the Creature Phase, with a few extra features thrown in for good measure. As with all the phases in Spore, the controls and navigation are refreshingly simple, ensuring that you never get bogged down in any particular activity. This is a definite asset to Spore's myriad gameplay features, although while it prevents unnecessary confusion, it can make the game feel a little shallow in the long run.

After beaming your captain down to Adventure Town, you are greeted by the strange, rabbit-like locals who direct you to the Mayor, himself a large, humanoid frog creature. Greeting you with gibberish, he sets your first objectives. Getting to your desired destination is relatively straightforward but the navigation could be a little more streamlined; locating the different NPCs for each objective is made trickier due to the poor mini-map display that only shows small dots for creatures and little else. Finding my way around buildings and trying to figure out what each dot represented became frustrating, although it's a small issue. It isn't easy to get lost in the environments but a more detailed map would go a long way towards finding your objectives more quickly.

As you explore Adventure Town, you learn about interacting with characters and objects; for example, one objective sends you to Captain Awesome, who in turn mentions the Captain Outfitter, which serves the same purpose as the Tribal Outfitter but with extra sci-fi related items such as laser guns, missiles and energy shields. With your objectives completed, returning to see the Mayor ends your adventure and your captain earns experience, which unlocks new items in the Captain Outfitter such as additional weapons and equipment. Much like the creature parts, your equipment grants you new abilities for socialising and fighting, or simply boosts stats such as health and defence.

Once the tutorial is over, you gain access to the Adventure Editor, a powerful new tool that enables you to create missions for other space-faring players in the Spore community. The tutorial, in fact, was designed not only to introduce you to new features, but to demonstrate just the type of adventure you can concoct yourself using this dynamic new tool.

Your first task is to pick a planet from the available selection and then manipulate it in a variety of ways using the three main options: Terraform, Build and Test. Terraforming involves tweaking the planet to your liking; water, beaches, cliffs and the atmosphere can all be modified, and you can even define colour ranges by elevation so that mountaintops are different in shade to lowlands. Although the range of options at first feels vast and seems to allow a great deal of personalisation, there are plenty of limitations; if you want to create a planet with deserts in one area and tundra at its poles, for example, then you're out of luck.

Once the landscape defined, it's time to introduce plant-life, although again there isn't as much freedom as I would have liked; you simply pick species for small, medium and large flora and then scale the vegetation density across the planet, and while there is plenty of variety in the available selection of plants, a flora creator would have been a great addition. Other aspects can be tinkered with too, such as the time of day that the adventure starts, the global temperature (for ice or lava worlds) and atmospheric density (which when set high enough results in powerful electrical storms). You can also drag objects such as hills, mountains and lakes directly onto your landscape, which fit seamlessly into the environment. The process is easy enough but it does feel more laborious than directly sculpting the terrain by raising and lowering the ground.

Once your planet is ready, you can start designing your adventure by selecting characters and objects from the Cast List. You can only have ten of these, but each can have duplicates on the planet itself. Changing any aspect of one template affects all of them however, so any important character requires its own individual slot, taking up valuable space; for example, regular villagers take up a single slot and can be cloned to populate your world, but a leader or villain is a single character that takes up another slot all by itself.

Adventures may be split into up to eight acts, each featuring multiple objectives in order to activate the next act in the sequence, meaning that most adventures will be relatively short. Each object in the cast list can have its behaviour tweaked too, and there is a range of different modifications available. Characters, for example, are the most detailed, with many programmable behaviours and personalities such as their movement around the game world, an ability to ally with the captain and how aggressive they are. Adding objectives is as simple as dragging a marker to an object, with different options available based on the role that an object plays. These can be anything from simply 'kill this' or 'talk to this' to more complicated actions such as 'give something' or 'defend this'. All objectives are neatly shown onscreen for each act and appear in red if some clash prevents them from working as intended. The objectives can be quite tricky to get to grips with at first, as it is unclear what options some of them need you to assign for them to work. Trial and error is necessary to begin with, but soon enough it becomes second nature - and when your adventure is at last complete, the final step is to publish it online for others to play and rate either via a Sporepedia search or through seamless integration into the Space Phase.

It's surprising that this feature did not appear in the original game, as it feels like a natural part of the multi-limbed beast that is Spore; perhaps it was in the works but had to be cut due to running out of development time. It plays more or less like any other portion of the game, meaning that Spore veterans will immediately take to it, yet it's simple enough for newcomers to understand and enjoy as well. It's this simplicity however that can often lead to disappointment; as incredibly dynamic and accessible as it is, some of the options feel too similar to others, meaning that you can find yourself repeating the same actions or objectives over and over again. Consequently, the majority of adventures feel samey, with just the characters and scenery changing rather than the actual gameplay. Objectives are not overly complicated and the restrictions upon cast size and adventure length can hinder creativity - and playing as a captain is so similar to the Creature Phase that these new adventures don't really push the boundaries of the gameplay. Still, if you love Spore then you're likely to love creating and playing adventures regardless.

Spore: Galactic Adventures is, like the original game, a qualified success. It fails to add much extra spice into Spore's hodgepodge of genres, but it does slot flawlessly into place in an entirely natural way. Spore's online community is by far its greatest strength, and Galactic Adventures succeeds very well in providing a versatile and original tool for players to demonstrate their creativity in an enjoyable and engaging fashion. As a content creator it's pretty ambitious, and while creativity has been sacrificed for accessibility in some regards, there's more than enough customisation and options available to keep gamers adventuring away for a long time to come.

Reviewed by Oliver Dearn for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).