IGN has published a hands-on preview of Spore Galactic Adventures. The expansion for Will Wright's evolution sim will offer the ability to beam down to planets, an equipment editor, and an Adventure Creator that will allow players to create their own missions and share them with others.

The first mission, created by Maxis for this demo, is called Mothership Down. It's designed to be played by your Space Captain, which is basically a heroic creature that you build up, sort of like Spore's version of Captain Kirk. The mission begins with you being shot down over by hostile aliens. One of your crewmates nearby tells you (yes, you can input dialogue bubbles so you can have conversation cutscenes) that the enemy mothership has to be destroyed in order for you to get extracted. To do that, you have to get across or around a battle raging nearby between your troops and those of the enemy. Then you have to battle up to the gate of a fortress and destroy the gate to gain access inside.

To show off some of the tools available to you, the courtyard of the fortress is littered with the kind of red barrels that tend to explode. You also have to kill one of the aliens who's holding the red key that you need to get past the red energy field to the transporter that "beams" you aboard the mothership. Then you'll have to battle through the corridors to the reactor, blast the reactor till it explodes, and race to escape the mothership before it detonates.

That's a pretty complex chain of events, and far beyond anything seen in the original Spore, where many missions revolved around the idea of killing X number of creatures, or finding-and-retrieving some object for somebody.

It's not all about combat, though. You can create plenty of non-combat adventures. For instance, the second adventure that we checked out dealt with a foot race between creatures. In this one, you have to get from the start line to the finish line, but how you get there is up to you.

IGN: Spore Galactic Adventures Preview

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