Startopia

The core gameplay of the management subgenre of strategy games has been applied to many premises and themes to create otherwise essentially the same game, in which the player takes control of some territories or facilities and the resources available to these, and then attempt to develop them further in-line with pre-determined rules to reach whatever level of success demanded by the current game scenario.

Startopia is just about the same kind of game fundamentally, but it introduces some innovations that are surprisingly technically sound and next-to bug-free. These make Startopia far more than just another game trying to exploit the appeal of extraterrestrial-yet-still-somewhat­-human sci-fi alien culture.

Startopia's premise is not really much different than that for the typical management strategy game. The player character, which is a rookie manager with promising potential, is brought in to breathe new life into some space stations and - hopefully - turn them into thriving interstellar economic hubs.

If a player needs a refresher course or some guidance on the fundamentals of this management game, there is a tutorial included in-game that would be able to teach these.

There is a campaign of some sort, but like the typical management strategy game, the scenarios are - in terms of narration - disjointed, with little relevance to each other. There are, at best, tests of the player's skills at achieving specific objectives and also introductory courses for some of the game mechanics.

There are few memorable moments in these scenarios. In fact, they lack the scripted events and triggers that are prevalent in the campaign scenarios in so many other management games. The most common difference (as paradoxical as that sounds) is that they have different scenario objectives and restrictions on how the player can go about this.

There are a few scenarios which are very different from the rest, such as one where the player is pitted against a decently aggressive AI opponent, but these are so, so few.

The player does get a reward of some kind when he/she completes the campaign and it can be quite amusing, but it would take a very, very tolerant player to go through the entirety of the campaign just to obtain this promised reward (which can be spoiled handily by a visit to YouTube). The other form of reward comes in the form of quips, jokes and inane statements from two of the primary characters of the game, but these can come at very inopportune times when the player is too busy to read them.

It should be apparent already that the main attraction of this game is not its single player campaign, but rather its gameplay designs and themes.

The first notable game design is the facility/territory that the player has - or has to gain - access to. Each space station is a toroidal region, a shape that has yet to be seen, much less implemented in a title in the management subgenre, which often resorts to square- or hex- based territories.

Of course, Startopia still expediently uses some tried-and-true designs; the toroidal space stations are split into circumferential segments, which have rectangular flooring that are made up of, well, squares. However, these segments are ultimately connected to each other in a loop; this can be seen if a player can unlock them all and develop them from one point and all the way around back to the same point. This peculiarity has yet to be seen in many other management games.

A space station is also further partitioned with the concept of decks. Each space station has three decks, arranged in a radial fashion with respect to the space station's axis. The outermost desk is the Engineering Deck (also known in some other regional versions of Startopia as the Technology Deck), the middle one is the Entertainment Deck and the innermost one is the Bio-Deck. What these Decks do will be mentioned later.

The previous statement can only be best understood if the reader is versed in some basic physics. Otherwise, to the layman, it means that for every segment that a player has on any Deck, the player also has a segment for each of the other two Decks. The Bio-Deck has the least amount of area available to do what the player can do on this Deck, while the Engineering Deck has the most.

The concept of Decks in Startopic is not a new one to the management genre. There were games that used the concept of multiple layers for the operations of the player's territories or facilities, such as the venerable SimCity games. Yet, in Startopia, each Deck is not a nonnegotiable essential to the gameplay (with the exception of the vital Engineering Deck). Unless the scenario requires it, a player can choose to develop only the Engineering Deck and still achieve success.

However, the player would be missing out on the appeal of developing all three and having them benefit each other in a satisfyingly synergistic manner.

Every management game will have the player attempting to juggle development of his/her territory together with any income that may be sent the player's way, usually through investments on said territory's capability to attract revenue. The monetary unit that will give a statistical measure to the player's efforts at doing this is "e", a fictional unit for energy in this game.

Apparently, in the canon of Startopia, the only recognizable currency in the galaxy is energy, which galactic citizens have somehow learned to hold within their sci-fi purses. (In-game, whatever transaction that they perform is only denoted by numbers floating above their heads.)

As the administrator of the space station, it is the player's job to attract the arrival of said citizens and convince them to fork out energy for the use of the facilities in the station, though they are also other ways to obtain energy as will be described later. This energy in turn will be expended in investment decisions and other operational matters.

It is worth noting here that despite having the physics term "energy" and appearing to be obtained or expended in ways that is similar to how energy is expended, energy is still effectively a monetary resource. As long as the player does not do anything that is known to expend energy in the game, any energy that has been collected will not degrade on its own.

In other words, a player should not be expecting a complete implementation of physical laws governing the storage and expenditure of energy in this game. Whatever game designs there are for the energy currency in this game, they are only there for purposes of expedience and entertainment.

The controls of this game are obviously centred on a lot of clicking. For example, menus for plonking down new stuff are called up with context-sensitive right-mouse clicks, e.g. clicking on empty floors call up facility-building options while clicking within facilities call up options for furnishing them. While by default the text and selection tabs for building options are a bit small, they can be altered to more comfortable sizes with a visit to the menu. (Unfortunately, there is no preview of the changes that would be enacted, so the player will have to continuously visit the Options screens to do fine-tuning.)

Other designs for the controls will be mentioned later, between more relevant passages.

The player starts every session, regardless of whether it is a campaign scenario or a session in other game modes, with a bunch of Crates (more on these later) that can be deployed into the most basic of facilities and a handful of "Scuzzer" droids, who will be the most reliable members of the player's workforce (which is not saying much of the others - the reasons will be mentioned later).

These basic facilities incidentally also happen to be the most important that the player has. The most primary one is the Energy Collector, which acts a repository for energy that has been gleaned during the operation of the space station. Another is the Port, which is the facility that will be used the most as it is the only entrance/exit from the space station.

It is worth noting here that like many other management games where the entry of customers/visitors is not automatic, i.e. they have to wait their turn to enter, Startopia also has a queuing system that will determine whether new arrivals to the station will step into it or get fed up by a long queue and leave. However, the game does not visually divulge details of the entrance queue to the player, who will have to manually select the port to see the incoming/outgoing numbers of visitors. Fortunately, the exit queue can still be estimated via a glance at the crowd (if any) around the Port and thus be used as a gauge of the need for more Ports or not.

In addition to the above facilities, the player also gets Crates for the default, lowest-level variants of the Scuzzer Droid. The Scuzzer Droid is a robot that will do the menial tasks of cleaning, maintenance and construction at the space station. They are conveniently coloured a striking yellow in order to have a high contrast with anything else around them (except other Scuzzer Droids). Scuzzer Droids appear to be quite able to do what they are meant to do quickly enough, though their getting to where they are needed is a different matter.

The default variant for the Scuzzer Droid is a slow-moving model, fit for only a small zone of operation. However, the game fortunately has more longer-ranged and faster variants of the same robot; these variants are visually different and satisfactorily so, because they are a lot more pleasant to watch than the wobbling, clumsy gait of the default one.

Droids of any kind have to be recharged and maintained (though they will do this on their own). These are done at Recharger stations, which service the droids and are also considered a basic facility. The process is an unimpressive, if a little visually odd, one. It also happens to deduct away a bit of energy every time a droid is serviced, but the amount is so miniscule, it can be handily neglected by the player. (However, if the player's account somehow manages to get into the red, the throngs of droids will suffer from lack of maintenance and compound the player's troubles further.)

Once the player has set up the basic facilities and droids that are needed as a foundation for the development of the space station, the player can then expand to include more facilities and furnishings.

A space station is a vast edifice, yet it still has limited space. Therefore, a shrewd player will eventually run out of initially available space, and will have to open up more segments of the space station. These segments are by default mostly locked with impenetrable bulkheads and are off-limits to the player. Some scenarios do offer segments that can be unlocked for free, but otherwise, they have to be unlocked by spending energy to "purchase" them, with the canonical reason being that these space stations are decrepit structures that need a lot of structural repairs (that have to be funded by the player).

Segments may also be locked by competitors with adjacent territory; players who are adjacent to each other control one of the two bulkhead layers separating their segments from each other, and in the case of one wishing to restrict access to the other, he/she/it can choose to close their bulkhead, effectively walling off territory.

The concept of unlocking and locking segments is an elegant one, and this can be seen when bulkheads open and close in their majestic slowness. Unfortunately, if the scenario allows for physical conflict which in turn allows bulkheads belonging to hostile players to be forced open by others, all that breaching and counter-breaching of bulkheads can be really ugly to look at. This and the game mechanics of combat will be elaborated on later.

Regardless of the kinds of visitors (except the insidious kind) that arrive at the space station, they will require facilities that serve their most critical needs, which are food, hygiene and rest (because apparently space stations serve as rest-stops too). These facilities are usually provided together with the aforementioned most-basic of facilities.

For the first need alone, there are many different facilities, though the most rudimentary is the Dine-O-Mat, which serves everyone. It has to be pointed out here that despite the inclusion of other higher forms of facilities that provide food, even at similar prices, the Dine-O-Mat is a must-have, which is a game design that the game does not inform the player of.

(The Dine-O-Mat also has different food production options, which determine how satisfactorily the customer is served. The more natural options are the most pleasing, though this consumes Food Supply goods – more on goods later.)

For hygiene, there is the Lavatron, which only accommodates a single occupant at any one time, in contrast with the Dine-O-Mat that can serve up to four simultaneously. While any form of messy "accidents" that may be caused by visitors who have yet to relieve/clean-up themselves are omitted from the game (likely due to age ratings concerns), visitors do get unhappy very quickly the longer that they have to wait in the queues for Lavatrons; the game does mention this when the Lavatron is introduced, but did not mention anything about the rather long servicing time. Still, this is a minor complaint, especially if the player had considered playing the campaign scenarios first.

It is worth noting here that the Dine-O-Mat and Lavatron are the only facilities that can be built on both the Engineering and Entertainment Decks and not just the former, which is a game design that the player is not informed about. Fortunately, the building options for both are available when the player opens the build menu in either of these decks, so the player won't be left in the dark for too long.

For the need to rest, the Berth facility fulfills this. This facility is the first that the player encounters and learns that it has to be deployed by drag-clicking, which is a technique typically used in management games to build facilities that have variable sizes. In other words, such facilities are room-based ones instead of the fixed-size sorts. In the case of Startopia, the player uses drag-clicking to determine how much floor-space that a facility would take up.

Usually, such facilities house equipment that is useful to their purpose. The Berth makes for a simple example, having only one major component, the Sleeping Pod. Perhaps as a wise move on the part of the game designers, it also serves as a handy introduction to the mechanics of placement of equipment and furnishing in a room of limited space. A bad placement of stuff within the room, as well as entrances and exits, makes it difficult for users of that room to reach equipment and enter/exit the premise, while a good one speeds up the process of the fulfillment of whatever wants or needs that they have, thus freeing up time for them to spend their time (and funds) elsewhere.

Fortunately, Mucky Foot is (surprisingly) wise enough to include some visual aids when designing room-based facilities. Colour indicators will appear to inform the player of a satisfactory placement or one that will cause complications, such as the path to equipment being blocked.

Interestingly enough, room-based facilities that have already been created can be decommissioned, which causes them to be packed into Crates automatically and instantly. Of course, depending on how much equipment that a decommissioned facility has, there can be quite a lot of Crates to handle (unless the player has a lot of Scuzzer droids, but this would be explained in another section of this review). Nonetheless, it is a very handy feature to limit the impact of any planning mistakes, because these Crates can be stored away for later use. Again, the Berth makes for a handy example as it is usually the first room-based facility to be deployed and during this time, there should still be enough space to practice deployment.

The last of the facilities that the game designers have deemed to be of the "basic" sort is the Comsensor, a communications device. Canonically speaking, space stations may be vast things in space that are obviously artificial, but without significant communication traffic coming and going from it, it would be perceived as no better than a desolate rock.

In-game, it controls the rate at which the space station receives visitors, as well as how well the player is informed of any incoming special visitors to the station or any incoming special events (of the sorts that need a facility like the Comsensor to be carried out). The benefits of this facility are dependent on the skill of the employees that staff it, but elaboration on this will have to wait.

There are many, many more facilities than these basic ones. Although this review cannot describe the designs of all of them, some notable examples will be raised later when expedient. However, it can be generally said here that many of them function as described and as expected, meaning that there are few - if any - bugs in the implementation of the ideas that the game designers had in imagining the functions of an interstellar establishment.

All facilities, except the Energy Collector, need to be powered before they can be operational. There is a game mechanic for powering facilities in this game, but it is not well explained in-game or within the documentation. The energy resource is needed to power facilities, which will require certain amounts of energy to be already within the player's account. If the player's energy account ever happen to fall below the total amount needed to power facilities, some facilities will shut down - which ones are will be determined by the game's calculation algorithms - to compensate for the shortfall.

Therefore, if the player lacks enough energy in the first place, he/she will not be able to place down new facilities, even if he/she can spend the energy needed to create them. The game does include the details of energy requirement in the in-game documentation of any facility (more on this briefly), an accounting equation in the tooltip for the player's energy counter and visual indicators in the colour of the text for said counter, so the player can still be informed enough when planning further development if he/she had bothered to look at these details.

Alternatively, a player can resort to the Power Booster. The Power Booster "multiplies" the amount of energy in the player's account with respect to the game mechanic of power, i.e. the player appears to have more power than he/she would have. The first Power Booster gives a multiplier of two, while a subsequent Booster adds one to that multiplier. Using Power Boosters as an expedient crutch for expansion is a handy technique, but it is a disappointment that the game designers did not include a detailed explanation of this in the game documentation.

On the other hand, the player pays a price for using Power Boosters; without them, the player will be able to power facilities indefinitely and freely (albeit the pace of development is crimped), but with them, the player pays a "fee" of sorts every minute or so for each of them. It's a small double-digit fee, but it can be sizable if the player builds a lot of Power Boosters in a gamble to power a new facility in the (usually vain) hope that it can quickly bring in revenue to offset the drain.

This game mechanic of power intertwining with the designs for the energy resource is a refreshing - though not entirely original - feature for a management game. It is a clever innovation of the game mechanic of loans found in the management subgenre.

(There is such a mechanic in this game, concerning one of the main characters in Startopia as will be mentioned later.)

If a player needs some more information on an unfamiliar facility, he/she can access in-game documentations on said facility through handy icons located close to their build option (if the facility has yet to be built) or icons located in the user interface when they are already built and selected. (The tutorial will handily point these icons out.)

Things other than facilities also have in-game documentation, handily enough.

However, some very important details on certain things are not immediately apparent and are consigned to the passages that pop up whenever these icons are clicked on. For example, the limitation of the Energy Collector, which is that it can only store up to 200 000 units of energy, is not told up-front. A player that is not very meticulous would not realize this until the game tells the player that excess revenue is being wasted as it is channelled to an already full Energy Collector.

With the game designs for the space station explored, this review would now move on to another important portion of the game and one of its loftiest promises: the entertaining sentient aliens that would visit and/or inhabit the player's station. In the game's canon, the galactic job market appears to have been streamlined such that certain careers are exclusive to certain races, depending on their traits.

If the player plays the campaign scenarios (and he/she should, despite their relative blandness), the first alien race that he/she would encounter is the Groulien Salt Hogs. Naturally resistant to harsh environmental conditions and having no qualms about working jobs which other races cannot or would not do, they are the only ones who work in Factories and Recyclers. Yet, despite what this canonical fiction would suggest, their interaction with said facilities is disappointingly simple; they simply push buttons at Recyclers, while they enter the models for Factories and disappear from sight before the Factories animate in ways that machine-heavy factories would.

The next alien race that the player would encounter is the Grekka Targs, which are a humanoid-insectoid race that is particularly talented in rapid, mass communications. They mainly crew Comsensors, and so the player may only need a handful of them (for reasons that would be mentioned later). Much of their work is quite dull to look at, as they mainly look away at screens and punch buttons (though funny things may appear on the screens of Comsensors, occasionally).

The Greys appear to be obviously inspired by the Roswell Grays. According to Startopia canon, they were once a race obsessed with doing research and experiments on the physiology of other races. While they have outgrown this obsession, it did leave them with an intimate knowledge of pan-galactic medicine that is near-natural to them. As such, they are predictably mainly employed as doctors. They staff a space station's Sickbay, prescribing treatments and medicine and working the machines there. Compared to the previous two races, watching Greys at work can be worthwhile because of the soothing effects of the Sickbay's graphics and deliberately slow but precise animations that occur in it. Yet, a player can expect little – if any – excitement from observing their line of work, even during events of medical emergencies (more on this later).

The Dahanese Sirens are aliens that can be considered the closest to being visually human. They also clearly have genders, though for gameplay purposes, both the females and males of their race are equivalent and have the same in-game behavior. (However, they do have different animations, as befitting their gender.) This can be a bit disappointing for players who had wished for more significant differences between the two different genders for the Sirens.

Within Startopia canon, Sirens happen to be one of the races that are pivotal in binding together the different races into a galactic community, and they apparently do this through their ability to fulfill the emotional needs of any member of any race (including their own) through strange powers that put their subjects into a trance, from which they exit all-refreshed.

In-game, they can be employed to staff the curiously named Love Nest facility, in which they can perform their special racial powers in comfort and thus raise the happiness of satisfied customers. Watching them practice their love-imparting profession can be very amusing to watch the first time, though an observant player would eventually notice that the animations for the working Siren employees and those for their customers are canned, regardless of the race of the customer.

The Karmaramas, which appear to conform to the stereotype of "hippies", are the only employees that can interact with the Bio-Deck in a meaningful and beneficial manner. In fact, their very presence in the Bio-Deck is enough to suffice as the fulfillment of the performance of their jobs, for reasons that will be mentioned later in a section specifically about the Bio-Deck's game designs. The best game designs for the Karmaramas can be seen in the Bio-Deck, but elsewhere, they appear rather mundane with little unique animations that reflect their entertaining, next-to-natural behaviors that they exhibit while in the Bio-deck.

The Kasvagorians are once a brutish race that loved wars, though they have long given up their warmongering ways (they are still brutish, however). In-game, their specialty as employees is the upholding of security in the space station. Once hired, they staff the Security Control facility, which is used to control Security Columns, supervise the rehabilitation/re-education of people with criminal records and oversee battles (more on these elements of the game later). Not unlike the Targs and Salt Hogs, much of their job at the Security Control involves pushing buttons, which is also as visually disappointing.

Turrakken are a race inclined towards the pursuit of science, but are otherwise dull creatures (except for the fact that they have two heads each). Hiring them places them in the Research Lab, where they develop improvements or new technologies for use on the station.

The Zedem Monks have largely sworn off a life of servitude other than to their peculiar form of faith, which apparently renders them sterile but literally changes converts to more Zedem Monks to keep up their numbers. In-game, they are the most ascetic of visitors, often eschewing the use of many but the most basic of facilities.

Zedem Monks only come in sizable numbers and for longer periods of time onboard the station after the player has hired some of them. Monk employees will proceed towards the Bio-Deck to erect the Star Temple, if they have not done so already. The Star Temple is an edifice that more than resembles the real-life Stonehenge, and will be the place that Zedem Monks – both employees and visitors – mill about the most.

Zedem Monk employees are not employees per se; they have very low salaries and they do not do anything that actually benefits the space station. Instead, they are more like missionary priests under the patronage of the player. They mill about the station, meeting other aliens (except other staffers, courteously enough) and attempting to convert them to their faith, which turns them into Penitents. Upon obtaining a Penitent, the player receives a sizable monetary reward from the curiously rich organization that all Zedem Monks belong to. On the other hand, the Penitent is a completely aimless creature that slowly drifts about, doing nothing else (namely spending money). The Penitent will eventually emerge as a Zedem Monk, which is, of course, a hard customer to persuade to part with its money.

The game feature of Zedem Monks and conversion is not a new one, but its implementation has very interesting effects on the gameplay, namely the need to balance the potential income from allowing them to proselytize and the loss of potential revenue from having too many Penitents milling about.

It is worth noting here that the game fortunately has very convenient collision scripting. While alien characters will go out of the way of other incoming characters to avoid collisions, the game does not implement any collision between intercepting models that could not move out of each other's way, i.e. they simply clip and pass through each other. This is handy when there are a significant number of Penitents drifting around, who would otherwise take up walking space. They do, however, block the deployment of new facilities, which can be frustrating. Fortunately, if a facility's deployment zone is blocked by the models of characters, the game will handily force them to move out of the way. Still, waiting for the very slow Penitents to do that can be annoying.

Polvakian Gem Slugs, whose visuals appear to be inspired by Star Wars' Hutts, are something like the aristocracy of the galaxy, thanks to their unique physiology that ensure that they never run out of energy to spend. This also means that they have no need to work and can thus indulge in luxuries. In-game, they are the only race that cannot be hired and are visitors that are very, very difficult to please. Yet, if the player manages to impress them - usually by making sure that the station has facilities that are tailor-made to their luxurious whims – they will reward the player by ironically taking a dump right on the floor-spot where they decided so.

Amusingly enough, the reason for their complete financial independence lies in their faeces, which is made of very energy-rich Turdite that the player can retrieve and return to the Energy Collector for tremendous amounts of energy.

Of course, the concept of the Gem Slugs as hard-to-please purveyors is not a new one; this concept had been in other management games in other forms, like VIPs and auditors, which reward the player handsomely if they are pleased. Yet, the Slugs are the result of an entertainingly effective implementation of the game's sci-fi themes.

There are other alien races, though these are minor ones intended for visual association with certain other game elements.

Employees require salaries, not surprisingly. These will be deducted from the player's energy account at intervals of several minutes. How high these salaries are depends on their skill and dedication ratings, as well as their race. Employees also gain some employment benefits, such as free use of facilities that satisfy their basic needs and free medical treatment. However, they have to pay for leisure and entertainment like everyone else during their (self-determined) break-time.

Skill rating determines how well they perform their jobs; the game uses a probability calculation mechanic with said rating as a constant for this. As an example of the workings and effects of employee skill level, there is a probability (dice) roll when a Grey attempts to diagnose the diseases and determine which method of treatment is suitable; his/her skill is used as a probability modifier. Then, another probability roll is taken when the Grey applies the method of treatment, with his/her skill rating and the results of the previous test as modifiers. If the Grey fails either roll, the patient takes longer to be treated, and considering that patients only pay when their diseases has been successfully treated, longer treatment of course means that the Grey's time is not being expended in a profitable manner. Bad roll results may even result in the patient dying, forcing the player to pay for compensation, which can be hefty.

A player who does not like luck-based game mechanics would not like this system that is governing the performance of employees. However, Mucky Foot appears to have introduced so many variables and constants to the process of rolling, not just skill rating. Returning to the example of Greys, Greys with lower levels of skill can benefit from more advanced equipment in the Sickbay, and can also share patients with other Grey employees whenever the automated management process for the treatment queue hands patients over to them.

(Alternatively, a player may choose to prioritize the treatment of certain patients. This will result in the management process recalculating the queues and possibly even assign different Greys to said patients.)

Yet, despite the description above, the exact statistics and calculations that govern their actual job performance and persistence are opaque to the player. Thus, the player only has a rough gauge of their worth as depicted by the bars which visually represent their levels of skill and dedication.

The effects of the skills of employees other than the Greys will be described where relevant to the game mechanic being described at the time.

The dedication ratings of an employee determine how frequent their work sessions are and how long they last. A dedicated employee is more likely to be at work when there are important matters to attend to, such as a particularly long queue at a facility that they work at. They are also more likely to respond quicker and longer to any prioritization that the player has unilaterally set. On the other hand, they will have less time for leisure, when the player can regain the energy that has been given to them.

Employees will improve their skill and dedication ratings as they work longer. However, considering that employees with higher ratings will demand higher pay and pay-grades appear to be derived from a table of fixed values that cover the salaries of employees of different races and ratings, there is no incentive in holding onto employees. The fact that an employee with certain ratings is no more different than another one (of the same race) with the same ratings further reinforces this impression. The game does not inform the player of this, leaving the player to learn the hard way that it is sometimes better to just fire an employee of lesser rating and hire a new, higher rated one.

Whatever game mechanics that have been described so far concern facilities exclusive to the Engineering Deck, which is doubtlessly the most important deck, if it is not apparent already. The Entertainment Deck, in comparison, has less sophistication in terms of gameplay design.

The Entertainment Deck houses facilities that, fundamentally, serve to attract visitors of specific races and convince them to empty their wallets here. Some facilities, like the Love Nest and General Store, will attract visitors of all races. Other facilities are more targeted at one or more specific races, such as the Gun Store, which cater to races who have no qualms about resorting to violence, and facilities like the Slugpartments which outright pander to Gem Slugs.

It has to be noted here that the proportion of race-specific facilities to one another is not a statistic that the game designs considered. The more facilities that attract certain races there are, the more visitors of these races that the player would get. Yet, they won't affect the number of visitors of other races. However, the mood of these other visitors will be affected by the presence of facilities that they do not like if they happen to pass them by, which is something that the game does not inform the player well of.

Higher-rung forms of entertainment require a lot more investment capital, but they also increase the attraction rating of the space station proportionately.

Other than these otherwise simple game mechanics, the Entertainment Deck would not offer much in the way of innovations, though what it has is what the game offers most in terms of visual and aural entertainment.

The Bio-deck perhaps provides the most interesting game mechanic in Startopia. Technically, the Engineering and Entertainment Decks are actually already enough to depict the going-ons of a (fictional) space-borne edifice, but the Bio-deck and its mechanic seemed like a bonus packaged with the game. Unlike the other two decks, the Bio-deck appears to be a tunnel with strong, transparent roofs looking out into space, and said tunnel is filled with soil and water.

The deck is intended to show that the space stations in the Startopia universe are very much capable of supporting life – and apparently beautiful and profitable life too. Before life can be supported on the Bio-Deck, however, the player will have to alter the conditions within it.

The terrain in the Bio-deck can be altered in manners not unlike the methods in Populous. The elevation of terrain can be raised/lowered, its humidity altered and its temperature changed too, all complete with clear visual changes. These changes are depicted via changes in textures and polygon topography. They are not documented accurately within the manual, but some experimentation will eventually teach the player which kind of changes goes with what alterations in the properties of the location at hand.

If the player can get the right conditions, the player can grow specific plants in the Bio-deck. Just about any combination of conditions has at least one plant that can thrive in it, and the Bio-deck can have multiple spots or regions with entirely different conditions existing side-by-side, including polar opposites like hot deserts and arctic snow.

Interestingly, the player cannot seed the Bio-deck with plants himself/herself. To do that, the player will need to have visitors come to the Bio-deck and take strolls through it, apparently suggesting the possibility that plant seeds are propagated by the aliens themselves. The Karmaramas, due to their less-than-clean but vegetarian lifestyles, can especially bring a diverse bunch of plants to the Bio-Deck.

Karmarama staffers will tend to the Bio-deck, encouraging plants to grow. Exceptionally skilled – and happy – ones will occasionally release bursts of energy that accelerate the growth of plants.

Other aliens who enter the Bio-deck are there to take leisurely strolls through the serene Bio-deck, relieving them of stress and increasing their happiness (which, of course, encourages them to spend their funds away).

There can be some interesting visuals and very entertaining animations to be watched in the Bio-deck. Aliens swim through water, Zedim Monks walk on water, Sirens and Targs occasionally make flying animations, etc. In other words, there are many things that the aliens would do in the Bio-deck but which they will not do elsewhere. Nurturing the Bio-deck into a vibrant environment bursting with life both plant- and alien-based can be an enjoyable endeavour.

Of course, if a player prefers the Bio-deck to actually offer practical rewards in the form of materiel, mature plants in the Bio-Deck can be clicked on to be converted into Crates of goods. If the player does not wish to harvest them yet, but want to know how to grow more of them, the player can examine their botanical details with a click. Different plants give different kinds of goods, in both quantity and type. The rarer plants offer particularly lucrative combinations of goods, and discovering these and the conditions needed to grow them can be a pleasing experience. (It has to be noted that there is no in-depth documentation of the virtual botany that the player can indulge in.)

Speaking of goods, they are used for two purposes: supplying facilities that use them, and for purposes of trading. Goods mainly come in the form of crates, which are also used as units for measuring the amount of goods. Crates can be obtained from the Factory (after being manufactured), trading, conversion of plants or by un-deploying facilities.

(The last method can be exploited rather effectively to quickly produce lots of Crates of deployable equipment and facilities for trading; incidentally, it also happens to be a method that is not well-documented, for good reasons.)

Crates have to be kept in either Cargo Holds or the Pattern Buffer (more on this later) to preserve them. Otherwise, they decay into visually decrepit versions of themselves that have no less worth than garbage. The game includes a brief statement on this game design when crates are first encountered in the campaign scenarios, but it does not appear to have any built-in features to warn the player that un-stored Crates are being left exposed to the environments of the space station, which is surprisingly unfriendly to Crates. Finding out that a bunch of Crates has been left unattended and rotting away can be quite a frustrating discovery.

Fortunately, it is the duty of Scuzzer Droids to autonomously carry untended Crates to Cargo Holds to be stored, but they only do so if there is space left in the Cargo Holds. The game only informs the player when there is no more space in them, which by the time, there may be surplus Crates being left to rot. It is also a disappointment that only the game mechanic of trading appears to have designs that inform the player about the space left in Cargo Holds. For the other mechanics that allow the player to obtain Crates, there is none.

For the purpose of supplying stores, goods, if supplied, help accelerate their servicing times. For example, the Music Shop consumes Luxury Goods to accelerate its servicing time; conveniently, customers enter the shop and disappear from view, so the game designers saved some animation effort. Such facilities will automatically consume goods for every customer that visits them, but the player can toggle their consumption on or off to manage supplies. (There is also a handy toggle option for all shops of a certain sort.)

The other purpose of Goods is for trading. Engaging in Trade brings up a window, with a slider accompanying each item that the party other than the player wishes to trade in; the other party will not trade anything that is not in the list. Buying and selling goods is as simple as dragging the sliders around. Labels next to the sliders also conveniently show how favourable the prices are for certain goods.

It is worth noting there that the concept of supply and demand is implemented in trading. While merchants are more than happy to offload everything that they brought to the space station, they are not so willing to buy more than they want (the limit is determined randomly for each merchant). There are also changes in prices as every crate of goods is sold or bought, e.g. diminishing prices as the player sells away more crates of a certain type of goods, with conversely rising prices for crates being purchased.

These are interesting game designs that would encourage careful trading, but trading has to be done in real-time, even in single-player; the game cannot be paused to prevent time being lost due to trade deliberations. Moreover, once the player is attracting so many merchants and producing so many goods, trying to strike an optimally profitable deal is no longer a concern that is worth the time spent, thus making these game designs quite forgone.

As for trading partners, the player can trade with various kinds of merchants, but one of them will always be available to trade with when he does come by: Arona Daal, one of the Trademasters in Startopia canon and also one of its most entertaining characters. To simulate Arona's experience in handling space stations and his portfolio from profiting from a lot of matters in both dubious and honest ways, Arona always comes around with overpriced goods, but which otherwise tend to be so rare at the moment that the player would be hard-pressed to find them anywhere else, even after having attracted plenty of other, more scrupulous merchants.

After the Starport has been built, however, the player will begin to obtain access to merchants of the same races that come to visit the space station. Merchants of a particular race will bring together goods of particular sorts, often at lowered prices, while having desires for certain goods that are not associated with the culture of their race and which they will buy at prices favourable to the player.

Trading is intended to be a quick alternative to getting a lot of extra funds quickly, instead of the surer but much longer method of having to wait for visitors to satisfy their whims.

One other function of trading is to give the player an opportunity to gain Hardplan Crates that allow the player to deploy facilities or equipment that the player doesn't have the technology for yet, but this is very dependent on luck, e.g. the next merchant to come around may not have what the player wants, not even Arona Daal. Nevertheless, trading is the only way to get certain items, such as race-specific statues that are exceptionally potent furnishings for the space station.

Research is a more reliable method to gain access to items that the player has yet to unlock for deployment in the space station. Turrakken staffers will work in the Research Lab, dabbling in many projects when they are not given one to focus on. For them to do the latter, the player simply drops an item associated with said project to focus their research efforts on that. It is a simple system, though it also means that the player may have to expend some funds to obtain said item, adding to the costs of research activities.

To play the game, there are many things that the player has to click on and move to other places. This is where the game mechanic of the "Pattern Buffer" comes in most handily. While its name is all sci-fi, it is practically an off-screen tray that players can put stuff into and hold indefinitely, to be returned into the game-world when convenient. It is not an original game mechanic - there had been various forms of it in previous games, such as the ability of the hand cursor in Black & White to hold resources - but it had yet to be in an innovative form like the one in Startopia, which allows the player to hold different items in a virtually free-wheeling number of permutations.

Using the Pattern Buffer, the player can quickly haul items like garbage, Crates, bombs, plants, furniture and equipment all over the space station, and then deposit them where appropriate. Playing in single-player allows the player to make use of the time-pausing feature to save in-game time.

In addition, the tray preserves the state of whatever that have been picked up and placed into it, so it can be used like a make-shift, temporary mini-Cargo Hold.

Startopia does not shy from themes of conflict, violence and physical harm, despite its other, more charming themes. A space station floating in the vast void is a great asset to anyone who controls it, so the player will often not be alone in trying to assert dominion over a space station. A station floating in deep, dark space also tends to attract vermin and odd visitors who may not have the best interests of the station in mind.

The first of undesirables that the player would encounter are Space Rats; even these pesky rodents have their interstellar cousins who infest ships and, of course, space stations. They appear whenever the player has too much trash lying around, which in turn is a consequence of not having an operational Recycler, and too few Litter Bins for visitors to conveniently chuck their rubbish into. The player can attempt to exterminate these disease-ridden critters, but they move too fast for the player to click on without resorting to pauses.

Visitors with (often amusing) criminal records may enter the space station, eager to cause operational hiccups. Regardless of whatever offenses that they had, all criminals will attempt to enter facilities and use them, passing themselves off as employees to unsuspecting customers. These mischievous acts, of course, have the consequence of ruining the reputation of the space station with their criminal clumsiness. It can be difficult to spot criminals, as they, at a glance, look no different from other visitors – at least until they enter facilities and start messing around.

Sending a Security Scuzzer to them would staunch the threat that they pose. The player can choose how they do so from three different ways: exterminate them (which is a humorously expedient, albeit costly, solution), escort them off the station (which means loss of revenue from these poor fools) or sending them to a Lockdown Brig, which subjects them to rehabilitation methods that also include brain-washing. The last method is, coincidentally, the most amusing one, because the rehabilitated alien may exit the Brig with completely different statistics and records.

Next, there are the Memau, which are organisms that resemble cats and are just too cute for most sentient aliens to ignore. They are seemingly attracted to the presence of great amounts of litter, which they feed on. In-game, they appear almost spontaneously close to dirty locations (when the player isn't looking at them) and somewhat help to clear the rubbish. While the presence of Memau do appear to increase the happiness of visitors who are enamored by their cuteness - and happy visitors are likely to ignore the amount of garbage nearby and spend more - they do come at a cost: infestation of said visitors with parasites that ride on them.

They, amusingly enough, cause said visitors to eventually explode and reveal Skrashers, which are terrifically tough, berserk monsters that attack anything close-by. (It has to be noted here too that the player has to fork out compensation for the deaths of said visitors, further compounding the crisis.)

Such incidents involving monsters are of course undesirable. Unfortunately, the game does not offer any incentive to handle them successfully, other than the removal of obvious rampaging threats. There is no substantial reward for killing Skrashers, though their bodies do provide a lot of garbage that can be recycled into energy.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any reliable way to remove Memau, at least until they spontaneously disappear after having infected enough visitors. Most infected visitors would realize the danger that they are in and go to the Sickbay for treatment, but more often than not, the spotting of Memau would give a foregone conclusion that the player will inevitably deal with Skrashers. This is perhaps one of the most intractably frustrating game designs in Startopia.

Then, there are Agents, characters of a specific race that enter the space station with nothing but harmful intent. Their models are almost discreet, being small and tending to blend with the colour schemes of the two lower decks. However, they move about in a conspicuously and comically sneaky manner, making them easy to spot if they happen to be on-screen. On the other hand, the player cannot depend on staffers to autonomously and reliably detect and apprehend them; only Security Columns are able to detect Agents and only so when they make the mistake of passing by them. The player has to otherwise manually target them for elimination, which can be a hassle.

Agents may attempt to cause trouble in a few ways: they may seek out targets to eliminate (and these are usually highly paid staffers), go the Energy Collector to steal energy, or drop bombs, which is the nastiest technique in their repertoire.

It has to be mentioned here that bombs can be very, very difficult to find if the player had not spotted the enemy agent in the first place. The model for the bomb has very low contrast and relative size with everything else in the game; the only tell-tale graphical indication that it has is a blinking light that also happens to be small relative to its model size. If it is not illuminated by its blinking light when the player pauses the game to take advantage of the time-pausing option, the bomb can be terrifically difficult to locate.

The above-mentioned threats tend to be only one-off scenarios that happen occasionally. A more pressing threat comes in the form of other station Administrators, and the primary rule of administrating a space station is that there can ever only be one manager.

Like the player, opposing administrators, be they AI-controlled ones in single-player mode or human ones in multiplayer, will have access to the same game mechanics. This means that as the competing Administrators expand, they eventually come into contact with each other.

Unfortunately, this moment is where Startopia starts to show its worst game designs.

Depending on the scenario settings, the player can either do nothing to stall and roll-back the expansion of competing Administrators or attempt to wage war against them. There appears to be no non-violent method to take over the territory of competitors, the lack of which can be sorely frustrating considering the clumsiness of waging war.

The player, or opponents, may choose to sequester their territory from that of an adjacent rival

To take over a segment of enemy territory, the player will have to hack into the control console of the enemy segment; this can be done on any deck (and which is about the only strategic consideration in waging war that actually has sophistication).

Only Security Scuzzers can hack control consoles, and how long they take to do so depends on how well developed the enemy territory is. They also have to do so while fending off enemies who are trying to stop the hacking by shooting them up. Fortunately, if Security Scuzzers get destroyed while doing their hacking routines, the hacking progress is not subjected to reset; it will however decay, and considering how slowly Security Scuzzer wobbles from one end of a segment to another, this can result in a lot of lost time. Furthermore, ALL nearby Security Scuzzers will attempt to wobble over, resulting in a march of robotic lemmings that will do nothing to defend themselves from enemies who are taking potshots at them.

Despite their slowness and sometimes poor AI, Security Scuzzers are the most reliable members of a player's combat taskforce, mainly due to their prompt response to any security disturbance, whereas the player will have to wait for the living, fleshy ones to finish whatever that they were doing before they respond themselves, if it was not security-related work in the first place. Furthermore, Security Scuzzers, like other Scuzzers, can be picked up into the Pattern Buffer and dropped where they are needed en-masse, which handily compensates for their clumsily slow gait.

It has to be noted, however, that Scuzzers appear to be befuddled momentarily when they are dropped out of the Pattern Buffer; they can still be shot at and damaged while in this state, which can be disappointing and frustrating.

As for the fleshy members of a player's combat taskforce, this irrevocably includes ALL of the Greys, Salt Hogs, Targs and Kasvagorians under the player's employ. When combat commences and high priority targets are selected, every employee of these sorts will respond (alongside Security Scuzzers), thus pulling them away from their more civilian jobs. This can be an exceptional headache when the player would prefer that they do their less-dangerous jobs instead. There is no way to stop them from entering battle, and considering that employee skill ratings are not extended to their combat prowess, the player risks losing valuable employees.

This frustration is compounded if the player allows Kasvagorian employees to select their own priority targets, an option which results in a lot of high priority targets being assigned almost instantly. Fortunately, the player can toggle this option, but when it happens the first time, the player would be reminded in a sore manner of the clumsy mechanics for commanding battles in Startopia.

As for combat itself, it consists of visuals that can be quite embarrassing to those who are expecting more than the spectacle of watching combatants prance and hop around while toting laser pistols and firing at each other willy-nilly. They may even unwittingly hop behind obstacles, which results in more comical hopping that was intended to get them into each other's line of fire again. These silly visuals are accompanied by weak sound effects, such as stereotypical sci-fi noises attributed to sci-fi weapons-fire. There is nothing aurally impressive about combat.

If the option of waging war is toggled off in a scenario, adjacent Administrators (who are not at loggerheads with each other) may choose to open their territories to each other, allowing the visitors of either territory to cross over into the other and use facilities there. However, there appears to be no other incentive to do so, and even this one has dubious benefits because the more impressive territory is more than certain to pinch visitors away from the other.

Administrators with adjacent territories cannot do anything in each other's territory, not even scrolling far into them due to a frustrating camera scrolling limit that will kick in when the player goes too far into rival territories.

The interaction between Administrators on the same space station is a very disappointing and woefully underdeveloped aspect of this game. This also unfortunately extends to the multiplayer portion of the game. Other than hiring Agents to sabotage the other players (and even then the player has little control over the objectives of the Agents' missions) and taking whatever opportunities that the other players had forgone, there are little other alternatives that players can resort to for the purpose of undermining their rivals. To win, the players have to concentrate on developing their respective territories, albeit faster than the others, which makes the multiplayer experience not much different from the single-player one.

During a play session, special events may be thrust on the player for the player to handle. Failure to handle these events well will usually result in penalties of various forms; in contrast, success in doing so rewards the player, usually in the form of hefty amounts of energy. For example, the aforementioned medical emergency is one of the earliest special events that the player encounters. In this event, a ship full of very sick patients is sent the player's way. The player gets bonus income from healing them, but risks them dying under the player's care.

Certain special events may be rejected, such as the said medical emergencies. However, others are thrust upon the player, such as visits by inspectors (whom the player will not be able to recognize outright as they share the same models as other visitors).

The skill of Grekka Targ employees determine the rate at which special events come in, how early the player is warned of any incoming special events and how much information that a player gets about these. Very good Targ employees can even predict incoming calamities several preciously long minutes before they happen, giving the player an opportunity to prepare. A good example of this is the forewarning of an incoming ship carrying severely diseased passengers, which the player may attempt to divert away before they reach the space station.

In multiplayer, other players can take special events that the player has rejected. This also extends to other optional offers like trade opportunities. However, the player will have no idea on who picked them up (unless there is only one other rival) and whether they accepted the event or not.

With the sophistication of (most of) the gameplay designs of Startopia elaborated on, this review will move on to its aesthetic qualities.

Although the graphical designs of Startopia are not exactly ground-breaking, they are still impressive for its time and most importantly, portray the sci-fi themes of the game very appropriately. The first graphical element that the player would notice is the decks themselves.

The Engineering and Entertainment Decks may look a lot like each other when they are still devoid of facilities, but the Entertainment Deck has a significantly and sharper cleaner look than the other. On the other hand, the Engineering Deck benefits from greater-detailed textures, with every square of flooring containing what seem to be panels, covers for wiring and cabling and outlets for infrastructural needs. Then, of course, there is the aforementioned Bio-Deck and its impressive portrayal of vibrant life existing in the void (albeit on space stations that can support it, that is).

Transitioning between these decks is a near-seamless graphical feat, with very little slow-down at all even on machines that are not powerful. This transitioning is made even easier as the act of switching to certain decks is mapped to simple controls, further emphasizing this feat.

Furthermore, the game loads saved games surprisingly quickly even on machines just above the basic requirements. Coupling that fact with another that scrolling across decks is a smooth effort, even when there are a lot of happenings on-screen, this raises the impression that the graphics engine uses clever means to efficiently create an illusion that the space station is a massive toroid. This suspicion is further reinforced if the limitations on the freedom of movement of the camera are considered.

Speaking of camera limitations, it is a bit disappointing that the player is not able to have a clear view of the space station exterior. The most that the player could get is the visual evidence of the toroidal structure of the space station from the Bio-deck, and even then this is limited by the range of the camera's tilt angle. On the other hand, a view of the station exterior would appear to serve no gameplay purpose, so this is only a very minor oversight.

The sci-fi visual appeal is also seen in the facilities. The most impressive one is the Energy Collector, which contains the energy that the player has collected in a corporeal, ever-flowing coruscant form that can be a bit mesmerizing to look at. There are also animation-based Easter eggs to be found, such as a tribute to Pong that can be seen when Kasvagorians who are having duties in the Security Control are caught sometimes playing Pong on that facility's main screen.

The aliens have models and animations that portray their distinct culture-defined personalities quite well, yet also contain, amusingly enough, some human qualities that players would be able to associate with. For example, the Kasvagorians have bodies that are powerfully-built to the point of exaggeration, as well as strides and poses that exude their martial confidence. Yet, having humanoid bodies and hands also meant that they express their feelings through hand gestures and body language that players may recognize as those that are typically used by actual people.

There appears to be some shared animations, such as jumps of joy and said hand gestures (if the model for the alien concerned does have hands). These may give an impression of laziness on the part of the game designers, but considering the theme of galactic-spanning communities and cultures that co-exist with each other, these shared animations should not detract too much from the experience of handling the needs and wants of (fictional) aliens.

There also appear to be lost opportunities for minor animations that would have otherwise enriched the experience of encountering these aliens. For example, the Targs have interesting model designs; they appear as stout and short humanoids with thick exoskeletons and insectoid wings (and heads). The wings could have been used to create some flying animations, but to the slight disappointment of players who had expected these, the Targs do not appear to utilize their wings beyond somewhat unimpressive hovering or e