Startopia (Startopia (PC))

Member Name: Amateur Clown

Product:	Startopia (PC)
Date:	08/04/02 (201 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Colourful, very very funny, very cheap

Disadvantages: Far too short, battles are poor

I feel I must begin with an apology, or rather an excuse for not doing many ops for a while, but I’ve been busy doing stuff and learning what sounds “good” from a guitar. One speciality of which I’ve come to a conclusion I cannot perform, the other reason is I’ve also been getting into Franks Herbert’s Dune novels and so far I’ve got through the first ten pages of the third novel in the series: Children of Dune. Actually I might do something on that…but anyway let us begin).

I first heard about this game in a PC Gamer mag, which gave the game 88% and I then played the demo that was released the following month, and seeing as I had a bit a surplus cash to spare I went and got it at £30, although that was when it came out. Today you’ll be able to get it really cheap, I just went to ebay.co.uk and it’s only £5.

“Set in the aftermath of a huge intergalactic war between powerful and aggressive alien races, a once thriving network of space stations and planets have been left lifeless…you will lead the way in rebuilding the network of space stations to a standard accepted by the individual alien races” reads the blurb on the back of the beautiful and colourful CD Case of Mucky Foot’s latest craze game Startopia.

So I put the disc in and up came the menu and to my sheer delight stood out the option to install “Direct X 8a”, so both that and the game were installed in a matter of minutes. The opening cut-scene is a somewhat classic distorted version of Space 2000 (or Space 2001, I forget), the only exception being the object thrown into the air is not a bone but a donut that goes nicely with the shape of one of the space stations that you’ll have to run.

The game begins with the artistic menus that come up and go away (you’ll know what I mean if you get the demo or buy the game), which is always nice to see that Mucky Foot have thoug
ht of things outside the game too. The game plays like nothing else, playing smoothly at the most complex situations. A smoothness, that is in fact dear reader, a lie. My PC, a P3 800Mhz, at points in the game that didn’t seem hectic at all, performed a huge treacly meltdown, similar to the likes of Monopoly Tycoon. You’d agree that the game itself is pretty good looking if you’re a theme-management fan like me so if you would please permit me to give you all the things you want to know about the game itself I would be more than enthusiastic to show you the highs and lows of intergalactic supervision.


What do you have to do?

You have to set up and manage a sort of tourist hangout place that must cater for 8 species of alien, them being: Groulien Salt Hogs, Greys, Kasavagorians (Gors), Grekka Targs, Kamarama Farmers, Zedem Monks, Polvakian Gem Slugs and the Dahenese Sirens. In each mission you have a different specific objective that resides along with having to set up and manage your station. It may seem quite daunting at first but VAL is always there to assist you in almost every step of the way.


VAL?

VAL (a Virtual Artificial Lifeform) is your Advisor and he makes the missions more of a walkthrough assisting you in almost every aspect of what is going on and what to do. In fact it’s really quite hard to tell what he’ll say next, as there are only so many repetitive lines he can say like during a breaching for example. His English accent and slight snobbery makes him one of the best advisors I’ve played in a management game. Next to the one off of Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper of course, and as an added bonus he has thus excelled one’s literacy as well.


Energy

In Startopia, you play not with money and dollars that we would be used to in other management games such as Theme Park and Rollercoaster Tycoon, no. We play with energy. Energy comes from your won
derful and generous visitors spending hard earned energy on things like Din-o-mats (diners to you and me), and other things on the Entertainment Deck, but also as a clever twist which I’ve noticed whilst playing a sandbox (skirmish) level, that your recycler actually feeds back energy your energy collector once it has recycled some disposed junk. Actually it’s more surprising than you’d think because a little cone thing on the top activates after a while and beams a green laser at your energy collector wherever you have chosen to place it.


The Three Decks

There are three decks on each station each with their own purpose:

The Technical deck - Where most of the management work takes place, here you can trade with passing merchant ships, you can interrogate prisoners, cure ill aliens aboard your spacestation, recycle waste, create any sort of crate with the help of a factory, basically this deck includes all the industrial side of the game.

The Entertainment deck - Where aliens can actually enjoy being on your station. You can get loads of new things for this deck, ranging from music shops to Cocktail bars to Oroflexes. This one is usually always a pleasure to watch the money come rolling in when you get sick of the Technical deck. Although it’s a same Muckyfoot didn’t think of having a Casino which you could have built on this deck, and even then there’s so many rooms you can build that I never got to try them out before I completed the game.

The Biodeck - a place where aliens can hang out thanks to the technology of Nano-soil and a glass roof. This part is brilliant and beautiful, you have four tools at your disposal, which include: temperature, humidity, relief of the land and water. By clicking the left mouse button the function of the tool is increased, so if you left clicked on a piece of Biodeck with the relief tool, the land goes up, and vice versa, if you click the right mou
se button it does the opposite of the tools function. The temperature and humidity tools are brilliant, because they affect the type of land that you can create below you, so one minute you could have desert, then rock, then jungle and then snow!

With these different terrians you can grow different plants with the help of karmarama farmers, which can be sold (if you’re that desperate for energy), or just to keep to make a nice garden for your visitors to enjoy. I don’t really love the water feature here though, because when you create water it sort of comes out in blocks, and then smoothens out. And even then when you have the land frozen around it shouldn’t the water freeze to? There are little things like that, which would add just a bit more class to the game, but really it’s pretty good on its own anyway.

I always wanted to see and play a game that would include more than one level to work on and I guessed right when I knew that things can get quite hectic, but thanks to a pretty nifty map that flashes on certain sectors for certain reasons that’s all made easier. Wonder if they’ll take my Theme Supermarket idea up…er, no.


Downsides

Like all games, none are perfect and this game does have some slightly disappointing downsides. First of all is its combat interface, attacking or defending a sector in the game isn’t really very…how to put this, efficient. See hiring aliens to fight for you is fine, it makes sense that only four types fight for you because the others won’t, as they’re probably peaceful or something.

To attack an enemy alien you have to click the cursor over him to bring up a small crossfire over his head, as you keep clicking this crossfire will grow making sure that more of your troops will attack that certain alien. Very well, but this could prove a bit pointless when it takes about 15 clicks to get 4 of your troops to attack him. I
do find this to get incredibly annoying, as taking over your enemies probably could have been a lot more enjoyable.

The second mishap is promoting the aliens you’ve hired or residents as they call them in the game. This I can see the point of but it seems as though every five minutes your residents start quitting which is really a waste of time. Last of all is what most mags like PC Gamer are saying: “it’s too short”. There are a total of nine missions, which may seem incredibly short but vary from 1 to a couple of hours to complete each mission.

The nine missions are linked with who you work for though the game you work for all the alien types and on one other mission you work for the Galactic Rehabilitation Authority. I found myself finishing the game but then playing the pretty decent skirmishes, but with a goal I shouldn’t have to get. The goal being that even though I had completed the game, there were still about 20 or so rooms that I hadn’t built. The game I feel progresses far too quickly and this lets it down in a big way.

One more moan is that the last race of alien of the game, Polvakian Gem Slugs, are utterly annoying. It seems that they only get in the way and add to any little annoyances towards the end of the game. Gem Slugs cannot be hired for any task, which makes them an annoyance sometimes rather than a pleasure. I think instead of having to make luxury apartments (“Slugpartments” as they’re called) specifically for them, they should just retain that snobby attitude but just use the same rooms as all the other alien races on board.


Conclusion

I do have to stress that this is a seriously easy game to knock, but that would be understandable because it is really as short as they say it is. But if you do like these kind of games I implore that you at least visit one of the many Startopia websites download the demo from there. Apart from a few minor
upsets, this game proves to be a humourous and in most places a well-thought game that has as much colour as B&W, it’s just far too short.

Summary: