Though it was entirely my fault for lack of research into the game, I really set myself up for a bit of a letdown in Darkspore. I was under the impression that I would be able to create my own heroes in Darkspore, using something similar to Spore's creature creator. I found the creature creator the most fascinating thing about Spore, and just sort of figured that Darkspore would feature something similar.
Now, unless I'm waaaay wrong on this one, Darkspore doesn't have anything with that level of customization. Big letdown for me. That's my own fault. I probably should have payed more attention to the news on the game =P.
What it does have, still offers plenty of tools to customize the legion of pre-existing heroes in the game. You get to arrange many of the bits n' bobs on the base character models, nice variety of skin color/patter options, as well as nice level of control over how the equipment looks on your heroes. That quite a nice set of features that Darkspore has over other Action RPGs.
Unfortunately, that's not enough to outweigh the general blandness of the rest of the game for me =/ . Playing with others in multi is pretty fun though. But then again, most action rpgs that follow the Diablo model seem to feel like much stronger experiences when played cooperatively with other players.