In an age when developers frequently delay their projects and spurt the phrase "it's done when it's done," it's refreshing to see a nearly complete and utterly robust game undergo a short development cycle. It's even more impressive when a developer undertakes an incredibly ambitious project and still manages to avoid long delays and vague release dates by hitting important developmental deadlines. In a relatively short 14-month time span, Mucky Foot Productions has developed an astonishingly detailed graphics engine and gameplay that blurs the boundaries of traditional genres in the company's second entry, Startopia.

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What exactly is Startopia? Like a few other notable games, Startopia is difficult to place in any single genre. The best category to fit it under would be the god-game genre, but even that classification is somewhat misleading. At its most basic level, Startopia is a strategy game where you assume the role of a businessperson with an opportunity to turn a derelict space station into a hospitable habitat for alien refugees dispersed from their homes because of interstellar war. Of course, there are other businesspersons that see the same opportunity and will stop at nothing to ensure their own success. Sounds easy, but with more than nine different alien species with nine different attitudes all occupying the same space, your plans to make a profit may be derailed rather quickly.

You start off the game with a newly acquired space station, which is composed of three main decks - the lower deck, the central deck, and the upper bio deck. The lower deck is where most of the grunt work for the station occurs and where most of your industrial and technological structures are built. Cargo from passing ships, technological research, and general production are the main focus of this deck, and when given a job, aliens will spend a large portion of their time here.

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The central deck is the most important of the three because the alien population spends most of its time here. Living quarters, shops, bars, and other entertainment facilities are all built on this level and each structure influences the way this deck operates. For example, building a seedy bar or a run-down hotel will produce a low-class area that attracts a particularly nasty group of aliens, but constructing a posh bar and a respectable living area produces a middle- or upper-class neighborhood.

The bio deck, as the name implies, replicates an entire customizable biosphere where you can manipulate the temperature, humidity, and even the amount of water to your liking. Lowering the temperature and raising the moisture levels will produce snow, while raising the temperature and removing moisture will create a desert landscape. Even the topography is customizable, allowing you to make hilly or flat terrain. One of the bio deck's primary functions is to provide food, which can be accomplished in two ways - the land in the bio deck can either be farmed or used to tend livestock-like life-forms. Either way, food harvested on the bio deck is much more nutritious than food served from a food replicator device and is therefore more beneficial to the aliens on your station. How you interact with each deck has a profound impact on how successful your section of the space station is - if you don't keep the aliens happy, your rivals will overtake your section of the station with ease.