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Most of the fun comes in the building and expansion of your base. The general management is also entertaining, particularly in sandbox mode, where you’ve got the whole suite of different rooms and objects to build. It isn’t as slick or stylistically consistent as Evil Genius 2, but it’s still not a bad effort. Particularly brilliant are the rubbish bins which, when full, actually walk to the recycling plant and vomit up the rubbish into the recycling chute. I also like the detail inherent in how the aliens and your robot workers interact with objects. The multiple floors effectively communicate the station’s size, while the visible curve of the station’s interior provides the unreal factor of sustaining life in space. I like the layout of Startopia’s station. Finally, the top floor is your biosphere, where plants are grown in various biomes to provide different resources.

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The first floor houses your entertainment complex, stuffed full of discos, cafes and theme park rides. The lowest floor is a utility space, where you build basic amenities like habitation rooms, security and medical facilities, trash recyclers and so on. Your station is split up into three levels, each of which prioritises a different area of operation.

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In any case, being constantly harangued when you’ve already done what the game asks of you is no fun whatsoever.ĭespite the unwelcoming introduction, I persisted with Spacebase Startopia, and beneath the game’s abrasive skin is some relatively robust management muscle. This is done in four separate tutorials for reasons I don’t understand.

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They’re framed like tutorial missions, but they aren’t as they don’t actually teach you how to play the game.

What doesn’t help is that the opening missions of the campaign are fairly basic, with lots of waiting for objectives to resolve. But the putdowns are incessant, as well as being mean-spirited and witless. A few jibes toward the player would be fine if they were mixed in with other comedy. Constantly.Īnd I really do mean constantly. So instead, the AI insults and belittles you. But it quickly becomes obvious that the game’s writer have no comprehension about how to write jokes. It’s clearly trying to do the whole “quirky AI” bit that’s so tired by this point it’s falling asleep at the helm. But they all read from the same dire script. There are actually three different AI types to be continually harassed by, including an unapologetic rip-off of GlaDOS. But Spacebase Startopia hits problems right out the gate by saddling you with the AI companion equivalent of Malcolm Tucker.

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You need to build pods for them to sleep in, discos and arcades to entertain them, hospitals to heal them when they get sick, all while keeping the station clean and free from inconveniences such as vermin infestations and space pirates.Īll of which sounds like great fun.

As with that game, Spacebase Startopia tasks you with establishing a thriving spaceport serving a wide variety of extra-terrestrial beings, ranging from bug-eyed greys to space yetis. The game is a direct reboot of Startopia, an underappreciated management sim from the mid-2000s. Its thoroughly unpleasant attempts at humour resemble one of the most spectacular comedy misfires I’ve encountered, immediately putting me at odds with what is otherwise a passable, if deeply uninspired, management sim. So it’s quite an achievement that Spacebase Startopia, supposedly a light-hearted game about building a space station, made me feel so utterly miserable about myself. It’s merely the way cursed ancient beings react when some ironclad ant rolls into their crib to shave the dry skin off their feet. Even in games like Dark Souls that mandate the frequent flattening of the player, there’s nothing personal in that hostility. But I’ve never felt actively bullied by one before. I’ve had varying negative reactions to games over the years, ranging from frustration through apathy and disappointment, all the way up to the occasional case of being downright offended.