Back in 2001 a group of former Bullfrog employees published a nice tycoon game called Startopia. Your task was to fill the empty shells of several space stations with rooms that made sure the wishes of your employer were carried out.
By building rooms, making decisions about the amenities those rooms contained and hiring aliens to staff the rooms, you started to provide services to the aliens visiting your station.
All of these tropes of the tycoon genre were generously marinated in a fun sense of humor. Thad made Startopia a fun game to play.
In 2019 Realmforge Studios (best known for their Dungeons series) announced that they were working on a remake of Startopia, called Spacebase Startopia. I have playing this game over the weekend after the beta became available last Friday and it felt like being back in the old game. But there is work to be done.
What do you do in Starbase Startopia?
You run a space station. To do that, you need money, or in this case, energy. Those energy credits are used to build rooms, furnish them and hire the staff you need.
You get more energy by burning garbage and fulfilling the needs of your visitors. Those visitors also have opinions. They get angry if your queues are to long. They can get sick and even die if you haven’t made treatment available.
More alien races mean more different needs, meaning that you slowly need to expand your station.
What is not so good yet in Spacebase Startopia?
Looking at Spacebase Startopia takes you back to its inspiration. Playing it shows some differences, not all of them an improvement. Also, being a beta, the game is a bit rough around the edges at times. My main concerns are:
First, in general, it feels like rooms and machinery are bigger, while the room I have available is smaller then it was in the original. This makes for a crowded space station. That adds to the charm but also makes things difficult at times. I’m not sure map size can be fixed at this point in development.
My second issue is the fact that some of already rather big machines can only be placed alongside a wall. Building a berth (a room for rest, hygiene and food/drink) is made difficult because apparently alien sleep pods need to be alongside a wall. In the original, you could place them anywhere in the room. It means a lot of unused space within those rooms. This might be fixable, making for more efficient rooms.
Related to the second issue, I find that the combination of rest, food, drink and hygiene in 1 room is weird. It’s a bit like having a bar/restaurant inside your hotel room. I’d like to see the food and drink as a separate room within the space station. (Update: some info on the beta forums implies this is coming, but not yet available in Beta)
Last, there are some smaller things I find annoying enough to mention here. The voice of VAL, the AI assisting you is quite grating. I’m not sure if this is the final iteration of that voice. If so, I will just mute it, just as I am doing now.
What is very good in Spacebase Startopia?
First of all, the atmosphere. I just like the way the game looks. I like looking at the aliens wandering about, my employees doing their jobs and most of all at things going horribly wrong.
Second, I like the combination of biodeck, fundeck and subdeck. Not only does the biodeck form a haven where the technology in the other two can be forgotten for a little while, the combination forces me to constantly keep my eye on all three decks. Like the original, this balancing act makes for interesting gameplay.
Third, I like the vacuum very much. Let me explain. In the original, you picked up stuff lying around piece by piece. A painstakingly slow process. Now you hold the LMB and just hover it all up, then to dump in a recycler for conversion to energy.
What am I looking forward to?
The game is in beta, quite early beta for that matter. So there are some things that are really not working as they should. And there are features completely missing at the moment. But I find the developers to be very responsive on the beta forums and my experience with previous beta’s by Kalypso shows that updates normally come out rather quickly.
I am really looking forward to playing more of the campaign, as the first two missions currently available are fun, despite some issues with unbalanced game mechanics.
I also want to dive into the multi-player. I think this game, especially with the combat it promises, will lend itself for fun PvP and co-op games.
Last, I am quite curious about the integration of the RTS-like battles the game promises. I am hardly an expert in that genre, but I like a good fight now and then and really want to see how that integrates into the management part of the game. My hope is for ways to influence battles by the things I do in the tycoon part. Time will tell.
Final Thoughts
For now I am having fun with the game as it is and looking forward to the first patch, hoping it will fix some of the more pressing issues.
Spacebase Startopia seems to have all the hallmarks of a worthy successor to a game many people love. In it’s current beta state it is not there yet, but with a planned release in October there is still time to bring the game up to speed.
