Startopia

Rating:
Summary: A Great Beginning
Review: This game is easy to like. The slick graphics and interactive feel make it modern and appealing. The quirky techno soundtrack helps too. The only complaint I can levy is that it's easy to finish all the "training" levels, and go straight to the open ended "sandbox" mode. After you control the entire station, there's nothing else to shoot for!
I bought this game pre-9/11, and I think something must've happened to stopo production on a sequal, or an improved newer version....I mean come on....Sim City got a second, third and fourth chance, and spun-off countless times....why not Startopia?

Rating:
Summary: Wow! This one is worth having!
Review: ....

The Game: In Startopia you are the manager of a torus shaped space station. Your responsibilities start out with some simple constructions and progress to more demanding arrays of resource management and defense/attack strategy. Concurrently, you must see to your alien's needs for love, fun, nourishment and rest.

Your station has three levels: the tech-deck, entertainment deck and biodeck. The tech-deck is where you build your industrial, medical and research structures and your most important item, your energy collector. Energy is the galactic currency and everything is traded in terms of energy value. The entertainment deck is where your aliens will go for fun and recuperation. There you will want to build pleasant diversions such as discos and casinos for your aliens to enjoy. Better entertainment facilities will attract more visitors. On your biodeck you determine the shape of the landscape, temperature and soil-moisture with a sweep of your all-powerful hand. Your workers will plant trees, bushes and cattails to name a few. You can harvest your plants for supplies that you can use or sell at a nice profit to a passing trader. Every plant yields different goods so there is plenty of experimenting to be done.

In addition to roaming the station to fill their needs, your aliens will provide you with an endless stream of humor. Security guards play asteroids on the security center screen and monks walk on water, to name a couple. Also, if you see a criminal being escorted by a security robot, do click on him to view the details of his crime, they are terribly funny!

Once the missions are completed, the gameplay doesn't stop but begins. The sandbox mode presents unlimited replay-ability and allows you to play against AI opponents. In both sandbox and multiplayer modes, you determine what the game's goals will be. You can opt for technologic advancement, total station segments, money or total score. You can pick one goal or a combination of goals. Truly, it is a very smart design.

Graphics: Startopia allow you to move the viewpoint anywhere in 3d space or view through the eyes of a roaming alien. There is a lot of detail on the stations' structures and creatures. Startopia's aliens are very smooth, colorful and detailed. Startopia lets you decide how much detail your pc can support with an array of video toggles and, you can run Startopia in any resolution from 640x480 to 1600x1200! The image artistry and video controls are superb making the views in Startopia delicious and smooth-flowing, simultaneously.

Sound: The sound is excellent. Sounds are localized to a region and fade outward allowing you to tell how far you are from an event by its volume. Position yourself in the middle of the busy entertainment deck for a moment and listen: nearby, love nest visitors receive a transcendental love experience, disco dancers boogie to a dance beat, the din-o-mat cranks out dinners for the hungry with vending machine precision, passing aliens converse, hilarious sounds radiate from the lavatron(restroom), and a bomb explodes on the tech-deck below you. In Startopia you get as much information from the sounds around you as you get from the sights in front of you.

Interface: The interface is smooth and attractive. A mini-station map in the upper left corner allows you to move to about the station with one click. You can view and interact with your staff and visitors from this menu. All the game menus are easy to use and self-explanatory. Startopia also features a brilliant 3 slot autosaving system that cycles through the slots and saves the game every few minutes. Its a great design that gamers will want every game on the market to feature once they have tried it.

now for the bad: Fortunately, there is very little bad to mention. There are a couple bugs but, I can't remember a game that didn't have any. The CrashToDesktop bug has affected many players who suddenly find themselves staring at their windows desktop. This has happened to me too but I found that simply turning the sound option down one notch to "medium" reduced the frequency of the CTD bug to very rare. When it did crash it didn't lock up my pc or require any reboot. All I had to do was restart the game and thanks to the brilliant autosave I lost only 1-3 minutes of gameplay. The other bug I found involves the pattern buffer - the place you beam items into for easy transport. Occasionally, an item gets stuck in the buffer and causes a CTD. Again, it didn't cause any grief because I just loaded the previous autosave, avoided the trigger, and carried on with the game.

To Mucky Foot's credit: I sent a save game with the one pattern-buffer bug that I experienced to Mucky Foot. To my complete shock and amazement I received a personal response from a real-live Startopia programmer in under 3hrs! ....

Making it perfect: A Mucky Foot programmer informed forum readers that the patch due out around July 25th will include the ability to map movement to the WASD keys and fix the couple of bugs known to exist.

Overall: In sum, Startopia is a beautiful, witty and original game that will deliver many hours of laughs and great gameplay at a very modest price. It will be very hard for competitors to top this game and very hard for gamers to stop playing it. With all its virtues, I can without reserve recommend Startopia with a hearty thumbs-up and a smile.

Experienced on an 800Mhz-AMD-Athlon, 256MbRAM, Voodoo5-5500, RoadrunnerCable, Windows98SE and latest drivers for all components.

Rating:
Summary: great game
Review: ended up giving this one away it was so addictive. very funny, cool sci-fi setting. if you like building games you should give this one a shot.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
Review: How could you not whant this awesome GAME! ! !

Rating:
Summary: Startopia goes to the stars
Review: I have to admit i've only played the demo and played a bit of the full version but from what i've seen this is one hell of a game it's so addictive I found my self playing the demo over a 100 times.

The game is based on a space station which you control(obviously). The space station has lots of segmants and you, at the start control, 1.Then you start to build infirmaries, com stations, berths,dine-o-mats and other building. Then when you run out of space you go on to the next segment and so on

Gameplay:4 Value:3 Graphics:5 Modes:3 (these ratings are out of 5)

Rating:
Summary: I love this game... all 10 minutes of it.
Review: I have to give this game a rating of 4 stars, even if it is short. The game design and camera angles along are worth it. I played the demo of this game when it first came out, and I remember just playing with the camera features for 10-15 minutes.

In a free play mode this is basically superb RTS world management game. With all the different features you can beat a level in at least 5 different ways.

The missions are great for learning the ropes, however they will only take about 2 days to beat, most of this time being spent in the last 3 or 4 missions.

This wasn't the most disappointing part though, because at the end of the origional missions there appears to be more, but they just do not work, or were a teaser for a never made sequal.

But, back to the positive side. This game's level design is open source, and anyone who can use a spreadsheet (Excel) can modify and create custom campaigns. So, if you've got some hardcore gaming buddies you can keep each other entertained for at least a couple months trading levels back and forth, or you can simply try your hand at game design solo.

With top rate graphics (for it's day) and a new look at an old game format, I have to go with 4 stars.

-- nemo54321

Rating:
Summary: Good at first but starts to lack...
Review: I have to start out by saying I loved Startoipa, I was excited to play it the first time and was stuned by its visual appeal... And I remained that way for about two weeks of excessive play. However after the first effects wore off, I was left feeling that the game lacked somethings that I'd like to share why I felt that way with you.

Each alien race has a specific job on the station, they each work in one or two rooms that you build. Some rooms don't require workers, (even tho you'd think they would), so right off the bat you can see there are some limitations, perhaps they should have had aliens that excel at certain tasks but can be used as general workers.

I was left feeling that the tutorials were inadiquite for my tastes, I'm a veteran video gamer and have played many games from many different generes so it shouldn't have been so hard for me to pick up the consepts. I also feel that the first 5 or 6 missions are basically tutorials. Each mission focuses on a specific room or race that the game wants you to build/learn about up until the 7th or 8th mission. (as a side note this agme only has 10 missions)

After playing a few "sandbox" missions i was left feeling like I had little control over the station I was trying to run. There are very few options you can set on each room/building and virutally no way to track things like cost/income ratios etc. Although these things may not interest you at first. Once you've been able to setup a successfull Starbase, you are left wanting. These tweaks could have made the game last longer, for those that wanted that kind of control.

Here's a quick list of other control issues that should have been addressed:
- there are "security bots" that patrol your station looking for bad guys, but you can't set patrol routes
- You only have to pay your workers when you hire them, and when you promote them, with no real reoccuring costs there's no real need to limit your hiring.
- Each alien has a few different ratings on how well they do their job etc, however these ratings seems to have very little impact on the actual gameplay.
- Aliens will sometimes quit and leave the station but there is no way to tell why (so how do you fix something if you can't tell what's wrong?).

Now don't get me wrong, a basic level this game is great fun, and looks great. The gameplay is good, well balanced, and there are VERY few technical flaws which is great in a game this complex.

However, I would say average life span of actual use for players would be 2-4 weeks depending on how much you play and how much control you want. If this is enough for you to get your money's worth I would suggest you buy it.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best games in the past few years!
Review: I knew before I brought the box home that I'd probably love Startopia. I love the Sims, I love the Dungeon Keeper series, and I'm a huge fan of science fiction. This seemed to combine my favorite game styles, adding in gorgeous graphics and a bevy of interesting aliens. I wasn't disappointed!

To start with, you get this GREAT send-off of 2001. If you haven't seen 2001 yet, rent and watch the DVD, and then watch the opening cinematics of this game. The graphics are incredible, and the whole thing is really funny. That's just to start!

The game gives you bulding power in a space station - you're trying to make the most interesting, hospitable and money-making space station around. You build power boosters to supply the raw energy for your structures. You get to build sleeping, eating, gaming, health, and other kinds of areas for your visitors. Taking it one step further than Dungeon Keeper 2, instead of just building a 'lair' for creatures to sleep in, you build the base sleeping area and then add in as many beds, lava lamps, and other items as you feel works well for your target audience. You even build recycling plants, turning litter and waste back into energy!

Each creature that comes to your starport has its own background, hobbies, skill levels, and more. You can hire people that seem interesting, and buy new items from travelling salesmen. Individuals can have criminal records that you can take into account. You can click on each creature and find out exactly how hungry, tired, bored, etc. it is at the moment, with cool animations.

The graphics are *beautiful*. Every room and item has its own animations which are very well done. Every race looks completely different from the others, and has its own characteristics. It's easy to get started, and as you go, you get space and more options available. The progression is very well thought out. Your robotic helper talks you through each stage with great deadpan humor, and helps out if you get stuck.

There are SO many little extras in this game that it would take hours to talk about them all. The security screens have us falling out of our chairs laughing, never mind certain character interactions, and a certain fuzzy pal/parasite, and much, much more. This is a game you can play for months and still be absorbed and finding new things.

HIGHLY recommended to any sim or Dungeon Keeper fan, and I have to believe that *any* gamer will find some aspect of this to hook you!

Rating:
Summary: Fun at first but wears off fast
Review: I'm sorry to say that I got pretty board of this game pretty fast. It was worth about 10 hours of "fun" play time for me, but from then on out it was just too repetitive, and confining. The animations are great, but the gameplay itself was lacking for me, and the storyline was really dumb in my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Fun at first but wears off fast
Review: I'm sorry to say that I got pretty board of this game pretty fast. It was worth about 10 hours of "fun" play time for me, but from then on out it was just too repetitive, and confining. The animations are great, but the gameplay itself was lacking for me, and the storyline was really dumb in my opinion.