6years later I still find myself coming back to this funky space station!
Startopia’s design is so absurd in every respect – music, graphics, characters, buildings – and yet it takes it self seriously. Startopia screams “I’m ridiculous, but I mean business.”
Sound design is amazing.
The ambient and techno tracks that play depending on what station floor you’re on keep you building late into the night. Zoom in on the deck and listen to the aliens go about their business. Graphics
Good for their time. To improve them you can download TomF’s shadows patch to add realistic shadows. Google it. Also can spice up the game with numerous alien skins from Startopia StrategyPlanet.
Gameplay
Expanding the station is a lot of fun, until you’ve built so much you wish you had organized it more efficiently. The catch22 of Startopia is the confined space. Once you own half the station you’ll have multiple building that do the same thing, but they’ll be scattered throughout the station. It would be more convenient and efficient for your buzzer droids to have all your industry buildings in the same area, but its only after playing a few games that you’ll have the foresight to organize your station such. There are also some balancing issues in the popularity of certain pleasure deck buildings. After you’ve expanded down the tech tree you’ll find older areas of your pleasure deck a ghost town.
Gameplay fatigue
While building a huge station is certainly fun and time consuming, it also can be overwhelming. Between managing natural disasters, spy’s bombs, alien monsters, and sick aliens, there are so many side goals in this sandbox, you’ll probably need to keep a written list. Hiring enough people, keeping them happy, tending the sick, researching new tech, growing new kinds of plants based on the environment in the greenhouse, building more bots to move your cargo, buying cargo low and selling high, expanding your decks to make room for more people, planting and harvesting a big crop of rare plants, and trying to delegate any job you can to your buzzer droids!
By the time you have a huge station you’ll be itching for something new and the only thing left is station combat. Big let down.
Despite it’s fallbacks, Startopia keeps me coming back every year.