You could check out DarkSpore as well, looks excellent. Not tried it myself, so can't really comment, but very tempted to go and buy it.
I couldn't find the Darkspore thread! maybe to many got burnt by spore.
I tried the beta and found it very pretty but i do not think it's worth the asking price.
Yeah its nothing special. Played 1 of the Beta's a bit cos it looked interesting but really it feels incredibly tedious. PvP is a waste of time because stats make more difference than skill.
The PvE i did keep finding myself opening the game up again to play it, I just never quite figured out
why. Levels are all 10 minutes long (ish, under 10 minutes is the gold medal, the way the medals work isn't great though).
While there is a total of 100 heroes available, i've no idea if they all have unique skills and at any rate, you can only take 3 with you at a time (and it seems you can only create 3 squads which makes it even more tedious). The way the skills work is each hero has 2 and a 3rd that all squad members can use so you can create some interesting synergies between them, unfortunately what that actually means is you pick 2 heroes to try and make 1 of them get the best synergies and generally only use that hero.
Balance is laughable as all skills increase in damage based on your primary attribute and its really not uncommon to have 3 items that do exactly the same things but each has a different attribute, it also turns out that a class that does really well on solo you'll go onto a 4man party and find out they're weak as hell.
Overall the game just feels really slow paced when the style makes it feel like it should be faster...