Spore is one of those games that I love to hate. The game is split into five phases with very different pros and cons. The Cell Phase is the most polished phase, but it's short and has very little content so it's little more than a minigame. The Creature, Tribal, and Civilization phases all suffer from having a lack of depth and being overly simplistic despite their complicated veneer. Tribal and Civilization are particularly frustrating, and not in a good way. The Spacefaring phase is the meat of the game, but it's tedious grind-work to advance, build colonies, trade, and defend. Your ship is the only one that actually does anything, which can get extremely annoying once you have more than a handful of colonies or if you want to explore the distant reaches of the galaxy. This makes large empires completely unmanageable. Galactic Adventures adds adventures to the mix, so there's something more to do now, but you're still left with the problem that every long-term goal is tedious. One of my biggest complaints with this game is how it punishes creativity. It gives you an absolutely breathtaking creature editor, then doesn't actually allow similar or duplicate creature parts to stack. This means a creature with 4 legs is just as fast as a creature with 2 legs... but it costs you twice as much of your evolution budget. This eviscerates a lot of the creativity since there is usually a "best" option for the kind of creature you want to create, and no reason to use anything else. With all that said, I still can't help but enjoy the lovely editors of the game. Making spaceships, tanks, factories, and especially creatures is still amazing. It was enough to draw me back in spite of the foul taste still lingering in my mouth from years ago. There was something brilliant there, but the game built around it stinks. If you think the creature editor is really cool and are willing to put up with a frankly bad game to play with it, then you might love to hate Spore like I do.
The Goatperson DLC is a great content pack for those who have finished the game and are (literally) hungry for more. The Goatperson is a special challenge class that flips normal gameplay on its head, fundamentally changing the way you play every dungeon while the triple-quests give you some extra challenges at a very high difficulty level. Those new to Desktop Dungeons should finish the game before buying the DLC. This really is extra content, and you're not missing out on anything by leaving it until you've already experienced everything the base game has to offer.
