Humble Report: Humble Square Enix Bundle 2 adds Startopia
A little while ago Startopia was added to the Humble Square Enix Bundle 2.
What the hell is Startopia?
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't heard of this game before. On the other hand, you've probably heard of at least one of these: Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital, Theme Park World/Sim Theme Park or Theme Park Inc./Sim Coaster. These are all games produced by Bullfrog Productions, and when Bullfrog was disassembled some of the crew formed a company called Mucky Foot Productions. Mucky Foot hung on for a few years before quietly falling apart, but not before they had bequeathed upon the world a game called Startopia.
Startopia is a game of the Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, and Theme Hospital school of management games. Though it hadn't made enough at the time it came out to save Mucky Foot, it has since gotten a cult following and for good reason. The graphical style is colorful and characterful, and the gameplay, though fiddly and sometimes counter-intuitive, holds up to this day (though, to be fair, we haven't had many games of this type since then). Except for the combat (yes, combat). The combat was just silly and not really up to the standards of the rest of the game.
It has layers, both literally and figuratively. The idea is that you're taking this derelict donut-shaped space station and turning it into a productive center of interstellar commerce section by section. You start on the engineering deck of just one small segment of the station, where you start with little sleeping pods, public restrooms, and take-out food, along with the essentials of any station: recycling stations, power generators, medical bays, and other things that may not generate much revenue but end up supporting the things that do. You then expand up to the pleasure deck, where the real money is made with shops, hotels, and entertainment, and then up to the bio deck, where you get to fiddle around with terraforming tools to create different environments and grow plants to harvest and create various goods. Really, the bio deck could be a sim/management game all on its own, but here it is, in the midst of this already-packed space-themed management game. When you need more space, you can start opening the giant bulkhead doors to the next segment of the station, eventually turning the entire donut into a bustling space city.
Though the whole Planet of Hats cliche is in full effect here, it's used well. It requires the player to balance their facilities for the needs of various alien species. Depending on what element of the station's economy and infrastructure they're trying to develop, you'll need populations of different aliens to perform different tasks. Models and textures lack detail by modern standards, but it's all very colorful and bursts with personality. Seriously, I could just follow a Scuzzer droid around all day, watching it pick up random junk.The voice acting is good too, with an AI helper over the course of the single-player story/extended tutorial who is not only not annoying but who speaks in a dry and sardonic British accent that puts me in mind of the drones from Iain M. Banks' The Culture novels. This is a very good thing.
You can mod it for widescreen, though the interface doesn't like scaling up and can end up very very small and even more fiddly than normal. Also, if you do play the game but are feeling like there's stuff behind the scenes that may be messing you up, there's a pretty good guide that I found.
In closing, on top of all the other cool stuff to be found in the Humble Square Enix Bundle 2, you've got this little-known gem that deserves some more exposure, especially now after some grand failures that won't be discussed here and an apparently renewed interest in sci-fi management sims. While we're all waiting for the various crowd-funded and/or early access titles to move through development, Startopia might be just the thing to tide you over.
-Taihus "Just use more Scuzzers", the raincoastgamer
Thanks, as always, to humblebundle for being the Humble Bundle.
