spore galactic adventures falls short

I have yet to pick up the Spore expansion Galactic Adventures for the PC and I'm beginning to think I probably am not going to. I enjoyed playing Spore for awhile and felt that it could surely use some new gameplay infusion that could come from a successful first EP for this franchise. Sadly, it sounds like Galactic Adventures is really best taken as a toolset of level design and game content creation, while its actual gameplay leaves much to be desired. This reviewer even calls it a series of mildly amusing minigames, which is never a very good description of what could have been an adventure-RPG-style game with deep potential. Sounds like if you like the level creation aspect of the game it might be a worthwhile pickup but that its shortcomings elsewhere really bring it down:

Nothing is essentially wrong with charging good money for a virtual tool kit. Yet the environments in Galactic Adventures cannot sustain the basic suspension of disbelief required to care about any digital construct. Common logic suggests that when a wall, a building or some other “solid” stands between two creatures, you can’t just shoot or move through it. In Galactic Adventures you can. I found myself jumping into the middle of supposedly solid structures and then shooting through the walls at foes who couldn’t see me, not a few times but over and over.

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