Startopia Impressions

GameSpot visited Eidos' San Francisco office to take a look at one of its latest projects, Startopia. Only in its 14th month of development at Mucky Foot's UK studios, Startopia is already shaping up to be a promising strategy game. In Startopia, you assume the role of a businessperson seeking to profit by populating empty space stations with alien war refugees. To entice different alien species, you'll build different structures and environments to keep the aliens happy and satisfied. Each structure and station modification requires energy, and the happier your aliens are, the more energy they'll pay into your reserves.

Attracting aliens to your station is only the first part of your task. You'll determine how they act as residents of your station depending on what facilities you build for them. If you construct bars, casinos, cheap hotels, or other generally seedy structures, the residents of the space station will act in an accordingly degenerate fashion - they'll throw trash everywhere and vandalize property. These structures will also affect your aliens' attitudes to otherwise objectionable technology, but this can be to your advantage. For example, when aliens scientists have spent enough time in dens of vice, they'll agree to create unethical weapons technology. To reach a more civilized society instead, you'll need to provide more station security, better sanitation, and respectable forms of entertainment. Of course, the military route is also open to you if you build structures to encourage your population's blood thirst.

In addition to the typical space station areas, a biodeck is also at your disposal. Here you can adjust climate settings such as temperature and moisture levels, which will affect the terrain by producing snow, sand, grass, or water. All kinds of different alien species will inhabit the biodeck, including those that you can kill and use for food.

The type of society you build is important because it influences how the other three computer players on the station interact with you. You will eventually run out of room to expand on the station and will run into other managers competing against you. If your society is violent, the other players will likely form alliances with each other to fight you. If your society is friendly, you have the opportunity to gain more technology and gain information from the other players.

Startopia features a fully 3D station - you can zoom outside of the station and look through its windows, or even zoom in on the smallest of the alien creatures to find out what its current needs are, like food, sleep, love, a bath, or entertainment. In addition, you can watch the aliens as they interact with each other or take advantage of your station's facilities.

This first look only scratches the surface of Startopia, but we'll have an in-depth preview of the game soon. Startopia is due out in November.