Spacebase Startopia is a starbase management game based on some earlier game I never played or even heard of, but which comes up a lot when I’m trying to Google things about the new one. You start with one of those spinny donuts that uses centrifugal force for gravity and fill it up with living quarters, medbays, factories, security stations, and so on. There are three decks, the sub-deck where you build infrastructural stuff including most of the buildings, the fun deck where you build space Las Vegas, and the bio deck where you don’t build anything but plants grow there and you can terraform the terrain into different climates to produce different plants which provide different resources.
Visitors come to your spacebase from eight different species, although they all seem to have pretty similar needs and end up leaving pretty similar ratings as far as I can tell. Different aliens are good for different jobs, so it does make a difference whether or not they’re a trash alien or a psychic enlightenment alien, but only if you’re hiring janitors. Positive ratings can be used to unlock new rooms and new tiers of visitors who are ever more demanding, from the space drifters who just want a bunk to sleep in up to ultra-luxury snobs who demand only the most cutting edge space Las Vegas in the galaxy, which not only requires more and bigger buildings but also that you keep them steadily supplied with advanced resources like molecular food (as opposed to most food, which is just pure carbon, I guess?), healing mud, and holo crystals, which you need to manufacture at factories. Visitors of any tier provide the same ratings, but higher tier visitors spend much more energy, the currency of the game, so attracting higher tier visitors gives you better income.
Your spinny donut is divided into twelve sectors, you usually start with 1-3 and can pay to unlock more, but also some scenarios have rival station commanders who already occupy certain sectors, and you can build giant mechs to muscle them out. Naturally, rivals can build giant mechs of their own and who wins a fight for a specific sector is going to depend on whose giant mechs are stronger and more numerous.
It all sounds pretty fun, and it kind of is, but it’s marred by poor execution at almost every point. First of all, the writing, something which absolutely everyone notices. The only voiced character is an insane rogue AI who spends the entire game talking about how much it hates carbon based life forms and how much better it is than you, and then in the last mission it goes fully rogue and you have to kill it. This isn’t an abysmal idea for a plot, but the writing is trying to ape some combination of HAL 9000, GLaDOS, SHODAN, and HK-47, and if you’re remotely familiar with those characters you’ll immediately identify the problem that these four have completely different personalities and motivations. HK-47 hates organic life forms because it’s programmed to kill them, HAL 9000’s motives are unclear but plausibly it was acting purely in self-defense, SHODAN is a megalomaniac with a god complex and the kind of bomb-proof optimism to go on believing in its absolute superiority despite multiple defeats at the hands of humans, and GLaDOS has two different characterizations but they’re both chiefly motivated to perform scientific experiments without seemingly caring much about what is discovered in the experiments, only the process of experimentation itself, and have a total disregard for human well-being without particularly hating humans at all (except Chell).
The Spacebase Startopia AI is called VAL, but Google says this is a holdover from the 2001 game, which had a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy style sardonic but ultimately helpful AI, so the HAL 9000 influences might be purely legacy. Of the three AI voices, though, one is a generic “robot,” one is a VAL 9000 callback to the first game, and the last is something like GLaWIN, clearly supposed to be a GLaDOS reference. The way VAL is struggling against human opposition in the background to maintain its ability to set your objectives is definitely reminiscent of GLaDOS, but that’s basically the only similarity. Its incessant spite for organic lifeforms is mainly informed by HK-47 dialogue, but without the assassin bloodlust. The frequent references to how much better VAL could do if it were running the station itself somewhat call to mind SHODAN’s megalomania, although VAL’s delusions of superiority don’t seem nearly as grandiose, more petty and passive-aggressive. Funny enough, that pettiness and passive-aggressiveness most calls to mind how GLaDOS speaks in Portal 2, except without two key factors: One, GLaDOS had a personal grudge with the protagonist Chell, and the petty vindictiveness was part of a character arc, and two, GLaDOS’ loathing definitely comes through eventually, but it’s a pretty slow burn, something which the Valve commentary for the game says was an intentional change made because people found it annoying to have some NPC berating them at the start of every level. Having played a game shipped with that writing decision, I can confirm, it is indeed annoying. Even more so is that, despite having you confront VAL at the end, the writers are too enamored with their creation to let it actually lose, so VAL wins in the ending cut scene despite having been destroyed in the last level.
Some of the other problems seem to be inherited from the 2001 game. As mentioned, different alien species’ needs as visitors are so similar that I never noticed any difference between them, despite each alien species being given a different approval meter on the ratings screen. This suggests a game where different species have different needs and you can neglect some to focus on others, but I have never seen a situation, whether I’m at high or low ratings, where the dominant rating concern wasn’t mostly identical across all species. If there’s long lines at the turbolifts between decks, then that’s every single species’ chief concern. If there’s not enough medbays and sickness is spreading on the station, that’s everyone’s chief concern. If there’s a bunch of trash accumulating everywhere, that’s everyone’s chief concern. Either give the aliens noticeably different needs so that, for example, the greys you hire as doctors do not care about illness because they’re all anatomical and biochemical experts who can take care of themselves, or else collapse all the ratings together on the screen and list the top complaint overall, which is usually the top complaint for every species anyway.
The game’s giant mech combat seems to be new? I’ve seen conversations online about how the 2001 game’s alien visitors could defend themselves and that people don’t like how the new mechs require you to leave wide avenues so that your mechs can pass through. You actually don’t have to leave wide avenues so that your mechs can pass through, though, so I don’t know if they patched that later or if that guy just made some assumptions and never tried to walk a mech through a tight-packed station to see what would happen. The problem is that sending mechs into battle isn’t really any fun. The amount of space required is obnoxious (you don’t need space between your buildings, but each mech requires a separate security station to support it, and security stations are big) and the mechs themselves are big and slow and not much fun to order around. The only thing to really do with the mechs is lob them at the contested sector and let the battle sort itself out. It’s fine that combat is a de-emphasized sideshow in this game, but then the last three missions of the single player campaign strongly emphasize the combat, which is not interesting enough to survive that scrutiny.
The three-deck system means that every spacebase you build must have the same basic arc and function. Building a space truck stop that focuses on trade while ignoring the fun and bio deck is a self-imposed challenge so massive as to be almost unplayable, because the fun and bio decks are still there and you can’t use that space for more berths, factories, and spacedocks. Creating a self-sustaining colony base that uses the bio deck and sub deck while ignoring the fun deck is missing out on tons of energy you can get from tourists, while the fun deck sits empty and useless, neither producing resources nor converting them into other, more valuable resources. Nor is it reasonable to go all-in on the fun deck and deal in tourism almost exclusively, because there’s no way to reliably import the resources you need, so you have to have significant on-base production. You can choose to unlock sectors on one deck but not the others, but the costs rise the further from your starting point you get, which means it’s never very long before it’s much more expensive to continue expanding your sub-deck than it would be to expand your fun deck instead. The only acceptable space station is one in which the bio deck produces resources, your sub-deck refines those resources into higher-tier resources while providing berths and other employee infrastructure like medbays and security stations, and the fun deck draws in big spenders to be your primary source of energy revenue. Even calling the manufacturing deck the “sub-deck” suggests that it’s a foundational support to the fun deck, not intended to be the main focus of a space station.
80% of a good game is here, one where the cost of opening new sectors is based on the total number of sectors unlocked on any deck, not the specific deck you’re unlocking, which means you never hit a point where adding more sub-deck sectors is shooting yourself in the foot because fun and bio deck sectors are now massively cheaper. One where different aliens have different needs, so you can build a station purely around the trash aliens you hire as janitors, the bug aliens you hire for comms, the greys you hire for doctors, and the leviathans you hire for security, ignoring research, entertainment, spirituality, and growing materials on the biodeck, so you don’t have to cater to the needs of the species who work those jobs nearly as much. One where trade is either not randomized, or else the goods stocked are so much more abundant that you can reliably buy things you don’t produce on-station.
Just thinking about the eight alien species suggests eight different focuses a station could have, a lot of which would be viable with only minor tweaks. The only reason a telgor-focused space flophouse whose only major income comes from renting berths and garbage recycling isn’t feasible is because there comes a point where expanding the biodeck and fun deck gets way cheaper than adding more sub-deck space for more berths and more recycling stations. You would also need enough biodeck to harvest the materials needed to produce fuzzies, the robot workers who do the garbage collection, and that breaks up the “pure slum” vibe, so it would also be good if spacedocks could reliably import basic resources like minerals and fibers.
But instead the game we have is one where there’s really only one space station to build, with ten scenarios that unlock bits and pieces of it here and there, and the end result is a high-end space hotel whose profits are used to fund giant mechs to capture other sectors of the same space station from rivals, and while that is a cool and kind of funny space station, it would take only the tiniest amount of effort to make other options reasonably viable.
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