Spacebase Startopia

Spacebase Startopia

This was mentioned in the Evil Genius 2 thread and I thought it deserved its own thread. This is a reboot of the original game Startopia which was developed by Muckyfoot and released in 2001. I picked up Spacebase Startopia last year sometime and played the beta. It was alright. The missions were kinda fast and I wasn't a huge fan of the voice acting for the spacestation. Since then they have pushed the game back a time or two to further develop it. I am looking forward to playing this I just hope it was as good or better than the original.

EDIT: It launches in 4 days (26 Mar 2021)

TL;DR I wish it was better than it is, but it is an okay game. 6/10

I have 15 hours into this. Spacebase Startopia is a remake of the 2001 Startopia and I wish I liked this game more. If I were to do a top 100 list of the last 40 years of video games i have played the original Startopia would be on that list. Likely in the top 50 or higher. The best summation I can give for Spacebase Startopia is that someone thought it would be a good idea for this game to almost be a beat for beat remake without many of the things that made the original Startopia so much fun. The humor in the OG Startopia was very British. It was dry, sardonic, and well told (as in the delivery). In this remake they somehow made VAL (VAL is the system AI you talk to) more machine like in every way. There are no pauses to allow the jokes to breathe a second. VAL instead of dry and sardonic is just insulting the entire game. If VAL is not being insulting directly they are constantly reminding you how you how much better machine intelligence's are than biological lifeforms. This gets repeated ad nauseam. The voice work for VAL is terrible too. One is a generic computer female, one a generic computer male, and one that wanted desperately to be GLaDOS. It is sad when the best VAL voice option is to turn the voice off.

The gameplay is okay. There are specific aspects that have been made more tedious than the original. Reasearching technology is one instance of this. The tech tree in OG Startopia was very self explanatory and you just worked your way down the tree. In Spacebase Startopia you first have to unlock the facilities you are allowed access to via a funky system of objective completion. So to make item A you might have to unlock two sections on the Fun deck for example. To unlock access to the next grouping of upgrades you would have to make a Cat Coffee shop on the Fun deck and so on. I did not play this to completion but I am more than halfway through the game and this shit got tedious fast.

The way you navigate the spacestation is also worse than the original. In the original game you just clicked the section you wanted to move to and it would move your camera view to that section and that functionality is missing. You have to click a button for the deck you want to move to and pan your mouse to either edge of the screen until you totate around the station tot he section you want to be in. Camera pitch control is slightly better in the new Spacebase Startopia being assigned to the left ctrl key.

Combat is far and away better in Spacebase Startopia than it was in the original. It is also more interesting. You build mechs and post them around the spacestation and watch them blow up everything. You can move them around but they require their own transport pads to move to specific areas. they also need enough room to walk around. So you can't have tightly placed buildings in any area you want the mechs to be able to travel to. There are also security drones which round people up andput themin prison or out of the station if you do not have a prison. They work fine.

Pacing. Spacebase Startopia moves too fast. All the time. It is busy for the sake of being busy. There is no way to pause the game (which is fine there wasn't in OG Startopia either) and there is no way to prevent people from coming to your base immediately either. So regardless of the mission objectives, you are on the spot from the get go to get shit up and moving. There is no room to breathe ever. You get your shit setup and you run from crisis to crisis until you have planned for everything that can go wrong. By that point you have won the mission. Then do it again and again and again. I have played no RTS or base building game that had this level of "gotta go all the time". There is some amount of downtime after your intial setup where you're waiting to make money but it isn't much. Busy is fine but whether WC3 or Evil Genius 2 there are times where you can just let everything you have built run and you're not running from event to event. You just appreciate your base setup.

Overall I give this a 6/10. I wish to fuck it were a better game. It's worth buying if you want to build a spacestation and manage the needs of the aliens that visit.