I can't remember the last time I lost sleep over a video game. Never since the original SimCity or Homeworld have I actually spent every waking hour plotting my next move. Not even Age of Empires can stake a claim in that realm. But what is it that makes this game - the most unanticipated and quietest game released this year - my sleeper hit? Is it the setting? The realistic-acting aliens? The dry British humor (or is that humour)? Let's take a gander at it, shall we.
2001: A Space Odyssey ("The good points")
So, you're asking, what could possibly wedge my eyes open faster then a surprise proctology exam? How about a diversity of alien races that all play an integral part in the workings of your station. Each race, from salt hogs to targs to kamarama to gem slugs has a unique personality and unique positions to fill in your station when hired. For instance, a good way to gain back some energy is to build a recycler to keep your decks free of litter. Upon building it, however, you'll find that it just sits there doing nothing. Yes, that's right, you need to hire at least four salt hogs to run it. Little details such as this help to suspend disbelief as well as make the game just a tad more challenging. On top of that you have three decks to manage: an engineering deck, a pleasure deck, and a bio-deck with changeable soil for growing plants to harvest and for added recreation.
Though the game does throw AI opponents at you from time to time, you are not only in a struggle for ultimate control of the station (which is the shape of a torus) but also in a struggle for your residents' fancy. There are a wide range of structures you can build such as love nests, star motels, palace galacticas, holodromes, bars, etc. all in the hopes of attracting more business to your portion of the station (while also struggling to keep all the businesses powered up as your money, called e-cash, is also the energy used to power the station). To make things even more interesting, the races react differently both to each other (when two visitors talk to one another, depending on what race each is, they can either get a morale boost or become very unhappy) and to one another's artwork which you can buy from traders and scatter around the station.
Not a fan of artwork? How about the ten included missions, where you get to be the manager of such things as a rehabilitation colony, a siren agency, a religious cult, a farming colony, a research institute, and more. Though the missions are laid out more like an extended tutorial, they are quite varied and ease you gradually into the last most difficult missions. The game also has a tech tree to research advanced items so you no longer have to wait for a trader to get them in stock and upon researching an item in two missions, it becomes a permanent item in your build list so you don't have to research it again.
Wow, my station looks a lot like my desktop! Unlike most other games that have been released in the past couple of years, Startopia is extremely stable. Though the game does slow down at times (especially when building new structures) it has only crashed out to the desktop once on me (in the middle of a firefight). The game also employs an autosave feature that will make three separate saves of your game rather then always saving to one slot (thus, you get three backups of your game: Autosave Alpha, Autosave Delta, Autosave Kappa and only one is modified each time the autosave commences) allowing you to alleviate mistakes without having to go back to the last time you remembered to save the game.
2010: A Space, er, Oddity ("The Bad Points")
As they say in the music business, for every Madonna there's a Brittney Spears. Here's some of the game's downfalls that are almost as annoying as Spears:
-AI opponents are brain-dead. If you focus strictly on your popularity in the early going (i.e. building a good pleasure deck) you can bowl over the AI opponents easily.
-The camera angles are more frustrating then the ones found in those seamy late-night television shows. The inside of the space station is extremely cramped and it is very difficult to zoom the camera far enough away to get a good view of the action, especially during a fire-fight. Also, while it is a nice touch to allow you to move outside the station when you are on the bio-deck, it also becomes very frustrating to modify the land at the edges of the deck.
-Through most of the game you'll spend most of your time juggling expansion efforts while simultaneously trading goods, picking up litter, zapping dead bodies into the recycler, building new scuzzer robots to keep the station in shape, hiring new workers, and going through the management screen promoting all of your workers before they quit on you. Hell, dogs are more independent then this. At least give me the option to turn some of the micro-management off.
-The manual is approximately twenty pages long. That just about covers the keyboard reference sheet, the onscreen icons, and the copyright notices. If you plan on buying the game, plan on putting out extra for the Prima strategy guide - if not to cheat, then to find out what the game is all about.
-Don't buy this expecting to have epic battles as found in games such as Age of Empires. The battles overall are a big disappointment and more often involve building hundreds of security bots just to get the upper hand.
-Anyone who has played Star Trek: Armada, knows how annoying repetitive speech can become (I must have heard "to Sto'Vo'Kor" at least 300,000 times). In Startopia, not only is the speech repetitive (and uncontrollable) but the music is also. You may find yourself turning the volume all the way down on your speakers.
-As your section of the station widens, you'll begin to wish for a feature to automatically take you to a particular structure. When crimes are committed or factories complete their production queue, a message pops up with an eye icon to jump you to the location. But most times, you want to find a particular structure to see how much business you are doing or to add furniture to it. In these cases you may spend quite some time searching though each section you own looking for the structure of interest. With the poor camera angles, it is quite easy to scan though the station and miss a structure entirely.
Multiplayer/Mods
Multiplayer available for up to four players per station in sandbox mode.
Modding tools are available on the Startopia website: http://www.muckyfoot.com/startopia/startopia.html
Modding consists of learning a scripting language similar to the one found in Duke Nukem 3D. There are tools available on the Startopia website to add your own voice-overs as well as brief documentation on the scripting language and the files related to the traders in the game. The designers recommend that you install the 1.01 patch before attempting to create mods.
Patches
A 1.01 patch has been released here:
http://www.muckyfoot.com/startopia/startopia.html
I recommend spending the time to download the patch as it speeds up the main menu avatar (a definite plus) and fixes bugs relating to peeps not paying at bars. It also adds peeps that pass out in bars and allows you to set more then one objective to be met in sandbox mode.
Replayability
How much sleep will you be losing playing this game?
Conclusion
Startopia is by far the most in-depth game I've played in a long time. Whether you are a fan of "spacey" games or not, I feel that there is something for everyone here. OK, it's time for me to pack my bags and catch the next shuttle to the Pyranic Conclave on Umilly IV for some anti-grav surfing. I hear they have good Kimpelli-Catnaic drinks there.
Tim Connolly is a full-time college student in the Computer Science field. As you might have guessed from his last paragraph, he is in desperate need of sleep. Or Prozac.
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