That's a lovely concept, theming your space station as a struggling health outpost - ER amongst the stars - rather than just 'build/kill x wotsits', and it's that focus on creating character and setting that defines the game as a whole. The missions are well-themed, too - for instance, cure 100 sick aliens with your hospitals before 10 of them expire from their assorted space-plagues, and all the while sniffy health inspectors sent by the Greys assess whether your facility is clean enough. Sandbox mode is a greater pleasure than the series of missions, which can be a little too exacting in their requirements and thus constricting of your indulgences, but goals have forever been important, and it's a useful way to ease in to what's a respectably complex system of building and citizen dependencies. But it's a complication more than a problem. Too many clicks, too much dissonance between identifying what you want and actually making it happen. Managing and recruiting staff, for instance, is a tiresome matter of browsing skill, diligence and loyalty attributes from a list, then click on an icon to zoom to the creature you want to hire, then having to right-click on it to bring up a new menu, from which you can then hire, fire or promote the thing. It's an odd cocktail of calm and frantic, with an interface that's on the one hand impressively minimal for the age but on the other often counter-intuitive. As for how it plays, that's a more mixed bag. On that scale, by the way - obviously there's the dramatic, galactic exterior shots, but while the interiors are less brazenly beautiful, essentially setting the meat of the game within towering, metal-walled warehouses, their use of extremely high ceilings and 2001-style curved floors (for each section of the space station is simply a small slice of an enormous donut in the stars) manages to make the busywork of building and hiring feel both claustrophobic and colossal a genteel, titanic prison.Ī wonderful game to watch then, with the simplicity and smoothly lurid colour of the character models and textures meaning it could as comfortably pass for a modern-day, high quality indie game as it could the best big-publisher efforts of 2001. It's classic management stuff, but the combination of scale and strangeness makes the game feel weirdly non-traditional even now. They sleep, eat and shit, they shop, they use 'love chairs', they leave their bloody litter all over the place, and they have an inexhaustible need for accommodation and entertainment. Oh, how I dream of a hybrid patch.Īs I mentioned, one of the great things Startopia does is to give the player near-absolute camera control, which does wonders for the many moments where not a lot's going on and you simply want to watch the assorted alien races who crew and visit your growing space station going about their business. Sadly the unofficial (yet dev-made) 1.02 patch which added dynamic shadows to the game appears to nullify the widescreen mod, so I made the difficult decision to choose scale over shadow. I've made Startopia my destination once again for the last couple of days, my first extensive revisit in many years, and I'm relieved to discover that it now exudes at least some of the timeless quality to be found in relative contemporaries such as Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park.Īs you've already seen, it manages to be beautiful even though any number of grumbles about geriatric lighting and character models could rightfully be pinned on it. We're seeing a renaissance of sorts of now, with Prison Architect, Spacebase and the craven Godus, but the fully-formed, big budget age essentially ended with Startopia (though you could argue similar for the muddled Republic: The Revolution, a deeply strange Icarus of a game from Mucky Foot's fellow post-Bullfrog offshot, Elixir.) Mucky Foot's space station-set management game was something of an era-ender, the last great gasp of the Theme Park descendant genre as-was. The current paucity of activities in the latter would have had me hankering for the former even if a digital postman were not able to immediately deliver it to my hard drive - it's one of few games I still have a hard copy of lurking on my shelf. 'Twas an odd coincidence that Startopia and Double Fine's Spacebase DF-9 alpha arrived on Steam so hot on each other's heels.
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