Category: Video Games

The Gunk is a 3D platformer game in which you are broke scavengers who land on an uncharted planet, discover an alien civilization in decline, and massacre approximately 90% of their population by destroying their food supply. I’m extrapolating the number based on thematic parallels, but it is explicit to the text that nobody has any idea how all these people will feed themselves once you’ve destroyed their food supply. None of them seem to mind, though, so I guess all’s well that ends well.

The titular Gunk is an evil space amoeba generated as a waste product in the strip mining of the planet’s blue magic life energy, which is used to sustain the alien population in the Garden. You spend the better part of the entire game figuring this out, starting by landing and investigating the Gunk, discovering that the planet’s ecosystem recovers when you clear it out, and then that there are ancient alien ruins here, before finally encountering a survivor who can explain what details xenoarchaeology could not. Then you enter the Garden and confront the Gardener. Twice. The first time it’s a dark night of the soul thing, the second time it’s for real. Which is when he has the dialogue asking how the protagonist plans to feed his people if she shuts down the Garden. She doesn’t really have an answer.

The parallel here is, as far as I can tell, a garbled combination of the impacts of the agricultural and industrial revolutions on Earth and humanity. It’s been posited by a number of economists, political activists, and psychotic murderers that agriculture was a net loss on humanity for most of the history of civilization, that generally speaking you were better off as a hunter gatherer than as a farmer. People became farmers not because they wanted to, but because they got forced into it somehow, and once farming is the only food supply you know how to do consistently, you’re stuck with it. That’s now how you get food, and if you try to wander into the wilderness to become a hunter gatherer, you will probably die before figuring it out even if whatever force compelled your parents to become farmers has since withdrawn or collapsed.

That sounds plausible when comparing a medieval French peasant to a Celtic hunter-gatherer in pre-Roman Gaul (if you’re pre-Roman enough, at least – by the time Caesar was conquering them, they seemed pretty agricultural), but a modern French citizen is in much better shape than either of them. The Gunk (to the extent that it’s making this comparison at all – seems plausible, but it’s not explicit) seems to be aware of this, in that it says the Garden was adopted because it was a more stable and comfortable life. But also the industrial revolution caused global warming which is starting to catch up to us in a big way, and the titular Gunk is probably meant to represent this environmental collapse caused by industrialism and post-industrialism.

But then the Gunk posits no solution to the problem. You defeat the Gardener, shut down the Garden, and all the aliens seem happy about it in the credits scenes, but, like, it’s explicit in the text that there is now an unanswered question of how everyone is going to feed themselves and if we’re going anarcho-primitivist, the answer is that about 90% (if not 99%) of them are going to die. None of the real solutions to this problem have anything to do with abandoning agriculture, but rather doubling down on it with vertical farms and new power sources (well, “new” power sources – our most effective tool in fighting climate change will always be nuclear power, which is ~75 years old at this point). After all, if that doesn’t work, and huge numbers of people die from resource collapse, well, then we can go be hunter-gatherers again. Our primary environmental crisis is that in about 30-40 years we are going to have drastically reduced arable land, so a solution that involves setting all our farms on fire is a lot like incinerating a cancer patient and declaring victory because you have prevented the victim from dying specifically from cancer.

It’s pretty clear the Gunk doesn’t actually want to deal with these issues in depth. It just wants a vague pro-environmental vibe. But its main villain is not an industrialist but the Gardener and its ending thesis statement is “what’s so bad about wilderness anyway?” What’s so bad about wilderness is that the overwhelming majority of the population is going to die in it.

The game also states (admittedly, through the mouth of a character who doesn’t necessarily know, but the Gardener doesn’t deny it) that all life on the planet is going to be wiped out if the Garden persists, and in fairness to the game, this pretty much reverses the moral calculus from the real world situation. In the real world, we may as well try to make agriculture work and save everyone because if we fail, we’re going to experience the kind of drastic population reduction necessary to return to hunter-gathering anyway, and in the Gunk, they may as well shut the Garden down and try to live off the land, because whatever percentage of their population they’re going to lose it will still be less than 100%. So if I take the game as a work of fiction, then none of what I’ve just written actually matters. But the game pretty clearly wants to be a defense of actual anarcho-primitivism. It draws a decent amount of attention to its thesis statement of “what’s so bad about wilderness?” and nobody, not even the practical-minded voice with an internet connection character, brings up the massive death toll. And it is a fairly common misconception that global warming is going to be a human extinction event (it’s not – killing the first few billion humans in the least habitable areas of the planet will reverse climate change long before the last few million humans in the most habitable areas have died).

The game itself is pretty fun and I didn’t hate it, but you can tell by its ubiquity in this post that its messaging really dominated my experience of it in the end.

Two Point Campus is a university management game in the general Sims style of bearing surface resemblence to the modern world, but then also there’s some robots and vampires dropped in anywhere it would make things more interesting. You set up lecture halls, libraries, major-specific rooms like science labs, kitchens, and jousting grounds, and things to keep student needs satisfied like dorms, bathrooms, cafeterias and vending machines, and student lounges that host rock concerts.

When I picked it up I said that I was disappointed that it wasn’t a magic school manager rather than a regular one, but Two Point Campus is almost a magic school manager. You can teach wizard classes and there’s no strong incentive to expand into a wide variety of different classes rather than doubling down on just one or two, so you can, if you like, have every student at your school be a wizardry major and there’s even a campaign mission that encourages this. There’s even two separate wizard-related courses, regular Wizardry and the Dark Arts. It’s still pretty barebones compard to what I would hope for from a full-fledged wizard academy game, but much more than what I expected from a university game.

Two Point Campus also has majors like Funny Business, Archaeology, and Spy School, so in addition to a regular university and Hogwarts, you can also run a clown college, Indiana Jones’ school, and…was there ever a secret agent high school themed YA book series or TV show or something? I feel like that happened at some point, but the closest thing I can think of is Alex Rider, who is a teenage James Bond-style operative but I don’t think he ever went to a special spy school. Anyway, you unlock different majors with points you get from leveling up your campus, which you do by buying things and hiring people and generally playing the game successfully. The amount of points for unlocking majors goes up linearly, but the amount of effort required to get them goes up exponentially, so there’s no hard cap (that I’ve reached, at least) for how many different courses you can offer, but the more you have, the harder it is to get more still. Instead of getting new majors, you can instead upgrade the ones you have, increasing the number of students who attend for that major and maybe also improving their grades or something, I’m really not sure. The cost on improving majors goes up with each level of the major, so you’re encouraged to diversify at least a bit, but only in marathon mega-schools will you ever reach a point where it feels like the game is trying to drag you into a major you don’t want to support.

This is almost exactly the kind of thing I was talking about with Spacebase Startopia, although only almost because there’s still only one kind of university to run mechanically. Some of the majors do have slightly more complex room requirements than others, the simplest ones requiring only a lecture hall while the most complex require multiple different laboratories and are high enough difficulty to tax your mastery of things like libraries and private tutoring rooms, which increase a student’s grade, something which is less necessary on easier courses and more necessary on harder ones. There aren’t really different builds for different kinds of university, though, some of them are just harder than others. Still, you can at least have the appearance of different universities, and the difference in difficulty isn’t nothing.

The game also has a sense of humor that is, in stark contrast to Spacebase Startopia, present. It’s not hilarious or anything, but it’s actually doing the sardonic British wit thing that Kalypso so desperately wishes it could do. Honestly, the broad theme of Two Point Studios so far is that they’re like if Kalypso were actually good at all the things they attempt. They should make Two Point Dungeon just to really rub it in.

The Red Lantern is an indie game about a failed doctor going out into the Alaskan wilderness to try her hand at becoming a musher and starving to death within three days. I’m being flippant, but I’m not joking. You pick out four dogs from a team of eight, you start out with one medkit, one kindling, two meat, and three bullets, and you quickly discover this is not nearly enough tools and supplies to survive the trip. Awakening from what turns out to be a nightmare, you decide to add about $30 worth of additional stuff to your sled before trying again. There’s no actual money in the game, I’m just roughly estimating the cost of two extra hunks of meat, an axe, some extra kindling, and exactly one additional bullet. In fairness, the meat hunks look pretty bulky, so I might be underestimating there. Still, the most valuable resource in the game is bullets, which look like they’re probably 30-06 Springfield ammo, which you can buy in boxes of 20 for $25. In fairness, the San Francisco med school dropout I’m playing as probably would not be able to deadeye snipe caribou with the reliability that I can win the little shooting minigame.

Once you start mushing, the dogs know the way, but you do choose to go left or right at various junctures and you get various encounters based on some combination of time of day, which choices you make, and random chance. I never kept careful track of my route, so I have no idea if you get the exact same encounters if you follow the exact same route (including camping at the same times so it’s the same time of day for each encounter). I tmight be completely deterministic or it might be completely random with your left-or-right decisions having no immediate impact whatsoever. Certainly, some parts of the map are labeled as having different animals from others. There’s moose country and there’s bear country, for example.

For the most part, you are making barely-informed decisions to go left or right and to either investigate or ignore different encounters (sometimes, but not always, it’s obvious what kind of encounter you’d be investigating, and sometimes the encounter investigates you) and hoping the game delivers enough resources to you to survive until you reach the cabin with the red lantern left out front, which your friend Margot has left for you. You do have a bit of control over what happens, by choosing whether to spend a precious point of hunger on pursuing an encounter with minimal information or ignoring it, holding out hope that you’ll get one that’s obviously a rabbit or bird or shockingly vulnerable moose that you can hunt so you won’t have to gamble on an encounter whose hook is something like “what was that noise?” and could end up being anything.

Given the game is a stealth Roguelike (but a short one, so I’ll forgive it) where you’re expected to fail multiple runs before succeeding, the main takeaway here seems to be “if you go to Alaska, you will die.” Not only is that the most likely result of your first run (and in fairness, that by itself is more “if you go to Alaska and refuse to spend an extra $50 on life-saving supplies, you will die”), a lot of the encounters are abandoned resources. Sometimes it’s a not-quite-empty box of bullets that might be litter, but sometimes it’s an abandoned axe or jacket, something where you wouldn’t expect the previous owner just lost track of it.

A run is held together with vignettes with one of your good boys. For example, in my first run, one of my dogs was Barkley. Barkley is a dog with a tendency to pick fights with wild animals no matter the odds, which I instantly felt a kinship with and decided this dog must be part of my sled team. While getting to grips with the game’s time and resource management, I wound up sledding through the dead of night, and I was attacked by a wolf. Barkley jumped in and fought the wolf long enough for me to grab my rifle and take advantage of my mysterious San Francisco med school dropout sniper powers. Later there’s another vignette where Barkley jumps in to intercept a squirrel aimed at my face, and decide to take the option to teach Barkley to bark at things before attacking them. This comes around when the sled is attacked by a tank on hooves while I have no bullets left, but Barkley manages to scare the elk off.

And then I died anyway. No bullets, no food, and still only about three-quarters of the way to the cabin. The game frames this as a nightmare that prompts the protagonist to buy the aforementioned $25 in additional supplies, but after the whole run with Barkley, it didn’t feel like a dream sequence. It felt like I died and reloaded. And then I died several more times. The threat of death does give the mechanics some teeth, but you have to build up a decent mastery of the game mechanics to make a successful run, figuring out which encounters are good or bad and which options in which encounters yield precious food and bullets and which waste a hunger point for nothing, slowly assembling an arsenal of survival tools and a decent starting amount of supplies. It does a pretty good job of making me feel like someone who’s getting to grips with surviving in the Alaskan wilderness, except that diegetically I am doing this through psychic nightmare visions.

I definitely think this would’ve been better as a sleddy-aroundy trading game (although not a complex one – the mechanics just don’t support more than 10-ish trips, tops, so the tertiary gameplay loop shouldn’t require more than that), though admittedly the problem there is that this is a pretty grounded story about a protagonist who feels like they’ve failed in life and are venturing into the snowswept wilderness to find themselves, and it would be weird to add into that story “just pretend that oil is shipped from the point of extraction to Anchorage in dog sleds.” But regardless, the game relies on a meta-structure of making multiple runs and slowly getting more familiar with the Alaskan wilderness as you do, and that’s good, but it does this by giving you a goal and so few starting supplies that you are basically guaranteed to die and have to restart multiple times before you succeed, and that’s bad.

The game is saved by its brevity, though. Each of the eight dogs has a different story you can play through (like Barkley’s) if you want, and that might take 4 or 5 hours, but just getting to the cabin alive only takes about 3, and that was long enough that the sense of wonder at the Alaskan wilderness the game was trying to convey hadn’t quite worn off by the time I got to the end.

In Cook Serve Delicious 3, the tower where your Cook Serve Delicious restaurant operated out of in CSD2 gets hit with a missile, something that seemed wacky and comically paradoxical in January of 2020, so you hit the road with a food truck and two robot assistants, Whisk and Cleaver. Whisk is your driver and generally nice and supportive while Cleaver rides shotgun in the original sense of the term and is more critical. This is a fun character dynamic and the line-by-line writing is good.

What I dislike is that the game is bad at seeing how well you’re doing and having Whisk and Cleaver react appropriately. Their comments seem to be based exclusively on what medal you got for the level: None if you failed completely, a bronze if you scraped by, silver for a good but imperfect run, and gold for totally flawless. Cleaver sometimes comments about how she’s really surprised if you get a gold medal, but this is informed neither by the percentage of completed levels which already have gold medals (variables that should not be hard to keep track of unless the game has severe problems with spaghetti code) nor by how many attempts this level in particular took to get a gold on (ditto, though less so). Like, the fuck do you mean you’re really surprised, Cleaver? I played CSD2, most of these recipes are carryovers, I am butchering these early levels, gold after gold on the first try. A character whose respect is difficult to earn is only compelling if they actually pay attention to and notice when you’re doing really well. It would even make sense for Cleaver to have a “don’t get cocky, this is the easy part” kind of attitude, but instead she acts like getting a perfect run is remotely surprising even though I just did fifteen of them in a row.

Whisk doesn’t escape entirely unscathed, either. Her gold medal comments make sense, she focuses a lot on how impressed she is by the achievement, but her comments on the silver medals often feel like they were supposed to be for bronze and got coded wrong or something. The Cook Serve Delicious series sets out to be the Dark Souls of food preparation games (one of the series taglines is “prepare to dine”), and I think that attitude may have leaked too much into Whisk, who is supposed to be the kind and supportive one of the duo. Particularly I’m thinking of a line she has in a silver medal that goes something like “I know you’re trying, chef, but maybe next time try a little harder?” And Cleaver adds “or a lot harder.” This dialogue makes sense for a bronze medal, but for a silver you’d expect Whisk’s answer to be more along the lines of “wow, nearly perfect, you’re almost there!”

I’m not sure what the dialogue is like on bronze medals or failed levels, because I’ve got none of either so far (the game is divided up between eleven “territories” across the post-apocalyptic United States and I’m partway through the third, so getting all golds and silvers so far isn’t a huge accomplishment), but I’m honestly not sure how Whisk could get much more critical without breaking character as the kind and supportive one completely, considering that a bronze is still a success.

I wonder if this is driven by the fact that you can get bronze and silver medals on Zen Mode, which disables the timers (you can still mess up an order by pressing the wrong button, but you have as much time as you need to prepare the recipe), but not the gold medal? The developer has discussed in a news update that Zen Mode was added to CSD2 in a bit of a panic and they were never really happy with it, so I suspect they may still think of it as a “fake” game mode that served as a band-aid solution to a problem that deserved more time than was available, and that came through in the writing. That’s a guess, but it reflects my experience of playing the game.

I mentioned at the end of my Spacebase Startopia post that you could imagine eight different station designs that should be viable based around emphasizing one of the eight alien species’ in particular. That post was already kind of long, so I’m splitting the outline of those eight station concepts off. Some of these require significantly expanded mechanics, while others require almost no expanded mechanics at all, and I’ll be tackling them in order of least to most changed.

Before we dive in, I want to note that there is only one faction in this game. Every player always has access to all eight of these species, and the stations I’m describing are specific strategies that should be viable in order to give the game more gameplay variety. So, for example, the Telgor Station is not a faction which is locked into a specific Zerg rush strategy that an enemy can hard counter just by knowing you’re playing a Telgor Station. It’s a way of building your station that focuses on telgor buildings almost exclusively, but rivals won’t know that until they get a good look at your base.

First of all, the Celebramer Station requires no changes at all because it is the one type of station that’s viable in the game as it exists. You run a biodeck to provide nature hikes and lakeside meditation while also providing natural resources, process those resources into refined resources at a factory on the sub-deck, and use those refined resources to run high-end entertainment venues in your space Las Vegas on the fun deck. Everything is oriented around maximizing the tourist trade on the fun deck. The Celebramer Station dumps lots of resources into new buildings to climb the tech tree up to the highest tier of space Las Vegas, which means they have the longest spin-up time of any station. At the end of it they get unrivaled energy income that can be used to dominate the endgame, provided they live long enough to get there.

Secondly, the Telgor Station requires only two minor tweaks. The Telgor Station is a space flophouse that focuses entirely on cheap berths and recycling stations to maintain some modicum of cleanliness. Its ratings will always be middling due to health and security issues, but that’s fine because it runs purely on low-tech buildings and high ratings are only useful for unlocking tech. The Telgor Station makes its money on scale, so the first tweak that it needs is that the cost of unlocking new sectors needs to be based on the total number of sectors unlocked on any deck, not the distance from your starting sector on the specific deck being unlocked. This means that unlocking additional sub deck sectors will always be cheaper than unlocking fun deck or bio deck sectors, which means the Telgor Station always retains the advantage of being the cheapest way to increase income right now.

The second tweak is that you need to be able to hire space pirates or buy drones in a crate or something, so that the Telgor Station’s ability to get energy fast can be turned into an ability to get cheap units fast. Without cheap units that can be purchased with pure energy and no significant infrastructure, the Telgor Station is only good at making energy fast in the early game, which means it can only win in scenarios where the goal is to make a small-ish amount of energy on a time limit (including a time limit imposed by playing against other players). With cheap units, the Telgor Station also serves as the Zerg rush strategy for combat-focused scenarios, where you try to mow an enemy down before they can even get started at the cost that your tech comes in much slower, so you will steadily fall behind your opponents economically and militarily if you don’t succeed in destroying them quickly.

The Bug Station requires a significant overhaul to how the trade system works, but that won’t have any ripples to the rest of the game. In the game as it is, traders come in fairly regularly and have a small and random inventory of resources and buffs to sell, plus you can sell them stuff from your cargo hold. The traders will buy most resources but only sell a small and randomized set, so if you’re manufacturing lots of goods, you can sell them to get lots of energy (the game’s currency), but then it’s a crapshoot whether you have anything worth spending that energy on. It’s possible to summon a trader through your communication center, manned by the bugrathorians (“bugs” for short), but this costs 500 prestige, which is enough to unlock almost any of the techs in the game. The comms also give you a couple of other nifty features so you will definitely want one on every space station, but you will also want exactly one on every space station, and once you’ve got it up and running, you’ll pretty much completely ignore it while absorbing its passive benefits for the rest of the game.

In order to make a bug station playable, two tweaks are needed in addition to the tweaks that made the Telgor Station work. First, the spacedock that allows you to trade with merchants needs to be available much, much earlier in the tech tree. The current position makes it clear that you’re intended to use it mainly to sell resources that you manufacture on station. Instead, it should be available low enough down the tech tree to be a potential replacement for your bio deck, buying resources for energy instead of unlocking bio deck sectors to unlock them. The lowest tier of the tech tree is called “space trucker” and while I realize the idea is that you are a space truck stop, not a port or warehouse, it would be fine if the spacedock was unlockable right from the start of the game.

Second, and this one is a big enough change that it probably counts as more than just a tweak, there needs to be a variety of different trader types you can get at your station, each buying and selling different kinds of resources. Some deal in highly refined resources, others deal in raw materials, some might deal in a specific resource type regardless of tiers, for example, buying both regular food and the tier two sushi or molecular food. Summoning a specific type of trader is done through the communications center, and the more bugs you have working comms, the more different trader options you draw from the deck. The exact selection is randomized, but more bugs means more options.

This means a Bug Station is going to work by creating a basic berth, medbay, and recycling station infrastructure to keep conditions livable enough that your employees won’t quit, then fill in all the remaining space with spacedocks, cargo bays, and factories. Your bugs summon traders who sell cheap raw resources, you process those resources into higher-end resources at a factory, and then you summon high-tier traders to sell the resources to. A factory can be set to auto-produce a certain resource any time the prerequisite resources are available, for example, processing minerals into circuit boards as soon as enough minerals are available to make at least one circuit board, and the same should be true of spacedocks, able to auto-buy resources of a certain type within a certain price range and up to a certain number, and auto-sell within a certain price range and down to a certain number.

And that means a Bug Station can automatically buy minerals from incoming traders up to a certain amount, process them into circuit boards, then sell them to outgoing traders down to a certain amount, which means you won’t accidentally sell out your entire stock if you want to keep a minimum number of circuit boards on hand for mech construction or whatever, nor will you accidentally fill up your entire cargo hold with minerals and/or circuit boards because you’ve hit a dry spell with traders who’ll buy circuit boards or got inundated with traders who are selling minerals.

The Bug Station makes a profit by keeping itself fairly lean, creating a hive of comms activity in the starting sectors with a bit of support infrastructure (including a small, low-tech fun deck for the station’s small population of workers – a StarCats Cafe is required to unlock security stations and therefore mechs, but that’s, like, the second thing you build in a fun deck, so you don’t need any extra sectors for that), and then filling in the rest of the sub-deck with very low-maintenance cargo holds, factories, and spacedocks that do not produce trash and require infrequent repairs. Since the vast majority of the space is low-maintenance, a small number of fuzzy drone workers is required to support the station, while the energy income from trade is fairly high. The Bug Station maintains middling ratings from a small number of inhabitants and a smaller number of visitors renting out spare bunks in the berth, which means it will never be great at tech, but it has good income to buy the same mercs the Telgor Station uses plus good manufacturing so it can pump out mechs quickly once the tech for that comes online. It’s still a fairly quick station and unlike the Telgor Station it’s not completely foregoing mech production facilities. It won’t be the station with the first mech, but it will be the first station to have three mechs.

The Dryad Station doesn’t require any additional tweaks on top of the Bug Station. The Dryad Station uses a slightly larger worker population and has a slightly longer spin-up time since it uses dryads on the bio deck to produce resources on-site and then manufacture them into resources for sale while still never expanding the fun deck past its starting sector, since that’s all that’s required to keep a small staff of employees happy (and even with the dryads brought on to run the bio deck, the staff of the Dryad Station still pales in comparison to the huge number of visitors the Celebramer Station brings in). The Dryad Station ultimately has higher ratings since it can fulfill the need for nature, higher income since it’s cheaper to grow the materials yourself than to import them.

I don’t want any of these stations to feel like they play identically to one another, but I don’t think that’s a problem here, it’s just that there aren’t any new mechanics needed to set the Dryad Station apart from the Bug Station. The terraforming mechanics of the existing game’s bio deck are sufficient.

The Grey Station is minimally functional as long as you can use the comm station to bring in large crowds of medical tourists. The gresularians, greys for short, run the medbays on the space station, and you make energy any time a sick alien buys treatment. If you could guarantee a higher rate of illness amongst incoming aliens, you could make reliable income by building lots and lots of medbays. Add a feature to the comms station that allows you to advertise yourself as a destination for medical tourism and Bob’s your uncle. This still requires the tweaks from the Telgor Station, but not any of the ones from the Bug or Dryad Stations, so strictly speaking you could fit it in between Telgor and Bug.

I don’t like this idea, though, because it means we now have two stations that revolve around stamping the same room down over and over again. I don’t mind the Telgor Station being a fast build that’s boring at scale because its purpose is to win quickly, not fill up all twelve sectors of the station. Add in a Grey Station that does nearly the same thing except with lots of medbays mixed in with the berths and yeah, it works, but it feels like it’s basically the same station.

So instead I want to make a fairly significant addition to the game: The addition of a hangar. Hangars come online at the Package Travelers tier of the tech tree, not because they particularly have anything to do with package travelers (honestly, I’m not sure why package travelers are separate from tourists, the next tier up, but maybe that’s just because there’s connotations of the term past its literal meaning that I don’t know about), but because that allows it to come online one tier before mechs, which feels right off the top of my head, which is the level of scrutiny I’m giving this outline as long as it’s a free blogpost.

Hangars come with shuttles, which can do different things when staffed by different kinds of aliens. Celebramers go fetch a bunch of aliens with a significantly higher than average amount of energy to spend in your space station, perfect if your station is full of high-end fun deck buildings that take lots of energy from a visitor at once. Telgors can be sent on trash collection missions, returning with a bunch of trash to dump into your recycler for energy. Bugs can be sent out with resources to sell them at a markup by taking them someplace where they’re harder to come by than local space. Dryads can be sent to retrieve plants of a specific biome, allowing you to either quickly mulch them into resources or else quickly fill in a section of the bio deck that you’ve just terraformed to a new biome (for example, if you just unlocked a new bio deck sector and the random biomes it came with aren’t what you want) to get local production up and running quickly.

And greys abduct animals to create a space zoo in the bio deck. Animal pens can’t have their plantlife harvested (it’s important to the animal ecosystem or something), so this reduces your income of natural resources. In exchange, the zoo helps aliens fulfill a need for nature faster, making it a good addition to a Celebramer Station, and it also allows the greys to develop bioweapons. Each species of animal (one per biome) produces a resource, and that resource can be taken to a medbay for greys to develop into a special crate that, when deployed, infects about 80% of aliens who live in that biome with an illness, causing them to seek out a medbay immediately. Each biome is already associated with one alien, so for example, the greys themselves live in the savannah biome, so a savannah bioweapon will infect greys in the radius. Not only can this be used to debuff boarding parties (for example, the space pirates who periodically appear in the station), using multiple weapons to target multiple species if necessary, you can also throw one into an enemy atmosphere filter, which will travel through the ventillation system and spit out infection in a radius around every atmosphere filter in that player’s control.

Since alien species are associated with specific jobs (apparently Startopia runs on a space caste system?), throwing in a polar bioweapon will infect 80% of the leviathans within range of any atmosphere filter, causing them to get sick and head to the medbay, devastating the target’s leviathan workforce – and leviathans run security stations, which operate mechs, so that’s going to seriously gum up their defenses. You can make the problem worse by lobbing a savannah bioweapon into the enemy atmosphere filtration system, causing their own greys to fall ill, which will jam up their medbays. Ultimately, the enemy can hire more greys if necessary to get the medbays working again to get the illness cured, but while they’re sorting out the crisis, you can seize the initiative on the frontlines. They can always try to debilitate you with bioweapons of your own, but if you’re running the Grey Station, you’ll have a lot of medbays to treat the problem with, to the point where even if every grey employee is within range of an atmosphere filter when you get hit and 80% of your greys are infected, your remaining greys will get to work deinfecting the population, and while you won’t be totally uninfected, the problem will sort itself out much faster compared to your opponent. Plus, you’ll have more crates to infect with.

In fact, since the Grey Station is a midgame station that tries to paralyze and destroy enemies before they can build up drone swarms, and since that means their bioweapons need to become available very quickly after they get hangar access so that they can get them out before their opponents get one tier higher and get security stations and mechs, there should also be a limit of one bioweapon per medbay. Just like each security station can only support one mech, each medbay can only support one bioweapon. You can replace the bioweapon after expending it, but you can only have as many bioweapons at once as you have medbays. This means a Celebramer Station or whatever will only ever have one, two, or maybe three bioweapons and will have to pick and choose which biomes to target and when to use them, but a Grey Station will have eight or nine and can lob them around much more freely, especially since they get replaced fairly quickly (I’m thinking 1-2 minutes, longer than a skill cooldown, but not a once-per-game bomb), provided you still have a pen containing the correct type of animal up in the bio deck.

I’m not positive if this is a tweak or not, but an alien with a bioweapon illness that goes untreated long enough should eventually die with a 100% chance to produce a chest burster. I know this can happen occasionally, but I don’t know how common it is, and the bioweapon illness should make it frequent enough that if the Grey Station bombards an opponent’s filtration system with bioweapons for most or all biomes and thus infects their entire station, they’ll need a lot of medbays to treat all the sick or else not only will their station be slowed to a crawl, they’ll potentially be destroyed outright by the subsequent chest burster infestation.

Some bioweapons have additional effects to help balance out how relatively unhelpful it is to target the aliens native to that biome:

-Bioweapons always kill plants of the same biome, but forest bioweapons (targeting dryads) kill all plants, so you can use them to wipe out some of your enemy’s natural resource production in their bio deck.

-Moon bioweapons (targeting telgor) have a 20% chance of infecting non-telgors in addition to the 80% chance of infecting telgors, making them great for lobbing into densely populated stations lacking in medbays (like Telgor Stations).

-Lava bioweapons (targeting eurekers) cause corrosive damage to nearby buildings and mech units in a single randomly selected atmo filter (not all of them – otherwise the Grey Station could throw three or four into the filtration system in rapid succession and level any section of the base with decent ventilation). Bases that have a small inhabited area on their sub and fun decks surrounded by a huge manufacturing, storage, and trade infrastructure (like the Bug Station and Dryad Station) will have a small number of atmo filters close together in the one small section of the station that’s completely non-redundant, so a few lava bioweapons in rapid succession can dissolve a critical part of such a station.

-Polar bioweapons (targeting hem’netjer – this change is intentional, we’ll get there in a bit) cause the infected to go berserk, possessed by dark spirits, which is mechanically similar to dying and producing a chest burster alien but it happens instantly, causing immediate problems for your target regardless of whether or not they have medbays. Hem’netjer are the highest tier alien in the game (some aliens don’t show up until you have certain tech tiers unlocked, and hem’netjer don’t start coming to your station until one tier above mech units), so the target probably has the security drones to deal with this problem, but it will tie up those security drones for a while.

-Swamp bioweapons (targeting bugs – ditto to polar) also kill vermin, so you might lob them at your own station to help clean up an infestation. This isn’t super helpful since vermin are pretty easy to clean up anyway, but infecting bugs is probably potentially really valuable anyway since it allows you to disrupt an opponent’s ability to call up traders for resources and hire mercenaries, so this can be a ribbon.

-Meadow bioweapons (targeting celebramers), rainforest bioweapons (targeting leviathans – switched as well, we’ll get to why in the Hem’netjer Station), and savannah bioweapons (targeting greys) are all potentially critical to an enemy station without additional effects, and I couldn’t think of a ribbon for them.

Since they can create a wide variety of different debuffs, the Grey Station is dominant in the midgame, able to tailor a viral payload against whatever kind of station they’re up against. Celebramer Stations find their income suddenly choked off and their ratings plummeting as their celebramers are infected and their fun deck is paralyzed, Telgor Stations are suddenly facing a massive infection crisis with few or no medbays to handle the situation, Bug and Dryad Stations have their small inhabited station cores bombarded by lava bioweapons. The Grey Station isn’t as fast as the Telgor Station, but it’s close, using relatively low-tech medbays (medbays are on the Drifter tier of the tech tree, only one step up from the bottom) for the core of their income, then using that core income to quickly get to the mid-tier hangar tech. The Grey Station is on the clock, because once their opponents get to the mech tier of the tech tree just one tier up from the hangar, they can put a security station down outside the range of their air filtration system, and the greys don’t really have room for lots of mechs when they spend all their space on a sprawling complex of berths and medbays, nor do they have the endgame income or on-station resource production to make mechs even if they can find room for the security stations.

The Hem’netjer Station is the turtle station. Getting hem’netjer on your station at all requires the Upscale Tourist tech tier, which is the same tier that unlocks research centers, so the only station build that goes higher is the Celebramer Station that goes to the very top. The first tweak they need over having a hangar for shuttle missions is that their temples are now constructed manually, not automatically, and are unlocked at the same tier the hem’netjer show up, Upscale Tourist. These temples are built on the bio deck, and a different temple can be built in each of the nine biomes.

The hem’netjer shuttle mission seeks out various harmonizing psychic crystals to bring back to the temples they build on the bio deck, one for each temple. They can most quickly retrieve a psychic crystal for their native biome, with biomes further away on the 3×3 hot/cold wet/dry grid requiring more hem’netjer and taking longer. To emphasize this, I’m swapping some biomes around: Hem’netjer are polar (and may need a redesign to reflect this), bugs are swamp, and leviathans are rainforest (and might also need a redesign, although this one is probably fine as a palette swap).

The hem’netjer have ice blue crystals from the wet/cold polar biome that can be easily retrieved. The wet/moderate swamps of the psychic bugs and the temperate/cold taiga associated with no species in particular are moderately easy. The cold/dry moon environment of the telgors, the wet/hot rainforest of the leviathans, and the temperate/moderate meadow of the dryads are middling difficult, being neither especially psychically sensitive nor psychically repulsed. The hot/moderate savannah of the greys and the temperate/dry radioactive of the celebramer are hard, their more materialistic and worldly cultures resisting the psychic attunement of the hem’netjer. The hot/dry lava biome of the eurekers is the hardest of all.

Once a temple is built in the right biome and the correct psychic crystal has been installed in it, it is possible for an alien of that species to ascend. There is a random chance of ascension every time an alien visits a temple, which they will do more often if there are more hem’netjer employees on board, so the Hem’netjer Station will want to employ a lot of hem’netjer first to run multiple simultaneous crystal-retrieval missions from multiple different shuttle hangars, and then to increase the spirituality need of as many visitors as possible to get them to visit the temples on the bio deck until one of each alien has ascended. When this happens, a final countdown begins to summoning a Cthulhu knock-off. The final countdown is announced to all players, and if any of the nine temples are destroyed during the countdown, the ritual is aborted. The other temples’ crystals remain attuned, but the destroyed temple will have to be rebuilt, a new crystal retrieved, and a new alien will have to ascend. If the ritual is completed, the hem’netjer summon a Cthulhu knock-off, every sector of the station under their control immediately ascends, and the process of ascension tears the rest of the station apart, defeating the other players.

The Hem’netjer Station can flex on other players by spacing their temples out a lot, but the smart move is to take the sector in front of your energy core (which you want to defend heavily anyway), divide it up into nine sections for the nine biomes each just big enough to hold a temple, and conduct the ritual there while maintaining a perimeter with some combination of turrets and mechs. Nothing the Hem’netjer Station’s ritual does requires a lot of resources – the nine temples are fairly cheap and cost less energy than a mech between them, the hem’netjer employees to man them cost only a few hundred energy each just like employees of every species, the hangars are moderately expensive but can be repurposed for other things once the hem’netjer are done with them, and the process of ascending aliens is not only free, it actually generates energy for you, since ascended aliens give all their remaining energy to you. It takes a lot of time, but you can spend your energy and prestige on other things while you wait – like defenses.

The Hem’netjer Station is also encouraged to actually use sabotage in a way other stations are not. The game as it is has lots of sabotage options, but they require a security station, which means they’re more than halfway up the tech tree, and then you need to unlock most sabotage options with prestige and pay energy to activate them. They mostly only inconvenience an enemy. They are pretty cheap once researched, but they cost a fair amount of prestige to research, and you are better off spending that prestige on upgrading mechs, which can actually win you the game, rather than sabotage, which delays but does not prevent your opponents from destroying you. Since the Hem’netjer Station’s build revolves around doing a very long but not resource intensive multi-stage ritual, sabotage makes a lot of sense for them. The prestige cost for unlocking it could still stand to be knocked down so that you can start annoying your opponents very quickly (quickly enough to meaningfully delay them from getting mechs, which are available at the same tech tier), but it also helps that the Hem’netjer Station does not, at any point, need to march mechs into an enemy station and blow up their energy core. If sabotage is effective enough to paralyze an enemy, they can do that instead of mechs, rather than in addition. This is still only a defensible strategy if they can also get some (relatively) cheap static defenses so that they aren’t totally helpless if a mech shows up.

The Leviathan Station can’t start out as a Leviathan Station. While telgors, bugs, and dryads are available from the start, and greys and celebramers show up so low on the tech tree that most scenarios have them unlocked immediately and even the ones that don’t will give them to you while you’re putting down some basic infrastructure for berths, recycling, and air filtration, leviathans don’t show up until the Package Traveler tier, and the security station they work at is unlocked at the Tourist tier. This means that by the time leviathans are even onboard, greys are already on the final leg of bioweapon development and the telgors overran you with hired guns thirty minutes ago. The Leviathan Station needs to be the Celebramer Station until it’s unlocked some core tech, because the Celebramer Station focuses on generating prestige, which is used to unlock new tech tiers and buildings. The Celebramer Station does that for basically the whole game, racing up the tech tree to the highest possible income as fast as possible, but the Leviathan Station will get off the ride once the hangar is available.

This means that the low-tier entertainment options should be the kind of thing you might find in a space pirate den. Replace the lootbox lottery with a seedy gambling den and move the lootbox joke to the tier two casino, swap the position and function of the starcats cafe and the bar (this also means that the need for drink and the need for relaxation need to be reversed in importance, which is no big deal), change the lights on the space disco to be all red with lots of dark shadows, brightening up to more purple and well-lit as you begin operating higher-tier entertainment buildings like the flying sushi restaurant and hotel space inn, things far enough up the tech tree that the Leviathan Station will never even look at them because they will be pouring all their prestige into combat upgrades.

Leviathans can use the hangar to raid nearby planets. The raiding targets accumulate more and more valuable resources, energy, and prestige the longer you leave them, so the Leviathan Station gets a burst of resources from initial raids but then has to wait a while for them to build back up. This allows them to leap up into the mech tier of the tech tree, at which point all future prestige goes towards combat upgrades.

Leviathans can also use the hangar to board an enemy sector of the station through their airlock. Leviathan raiders can be killed, and unlike security drones, they don’t come back automatically on a cooldown, you have to hire new ones, but leviathans are available one tech tier before drones, so you can plausibly try to mob an opponent with two dozen leviathans before their defenses are online. Energy cores have a lot of health, so this isn’t a practical way to actually defeat an enemy, but it can wreak havoc on their economy so they can’t keep pace with you while you get your mechs going. Since this makes hired leviathans into armed units, this also means they can be used as an emergency defense against space pirates, chest bursters, and enemy drones or other leviathans, or as speed bumps for enemy mechs. It’s costly to use them this way compared to security drones, which are both stronger and more expendable, but if you haven’t built a security station yet and space pirates are attacking the fun deck, leviathans are better than nothing. Leviathan visitors won’t fight for you, only ones you’ve hired. I considered having visitor leviathans fight third-party threats like chest bursters and pirates, but the problem is that it’s fairly easy to get one to two dozen visitor leviathans in your station, which is enough that they can probably deal with chest bursters and pirates without you really having to worry about it, and since leviathan visitors show up automatically at about the mid-point of the tech tree without any effort on your part, this makes the defense aspect of the game a little bit too easy.

The Leviathan Station shines in the mid-late game, they beat early game stations like the Telgor Station, Bug Station, and Dryad Station by surviving them until their mechs come online and then crushing them before they can get mechs (in the Telgor Station’s case, that will be a very long time, but the Bug and Dryad Stations can make a lot of them once they catch up technologically, so the Leviathan Station must act quickly), and they beat lategame stations like the Celebramer Station by choking off research and investment in the fun deck to pour all resources into mechs as soon as they’re available, getting more numerous mechs faster to destroy the lategame station before the lategame arrives. Their midgame rivals are the Grey Station, who come online at about the same time (greys use the hangar to abduct animals to produce bioweapons, leviathans use the hangar to get resources and prestige to produce mechs). The greys don’t have a direct answer to mechs except to infect leviathans, which can be mitigated by keeping leviathan security stations outside the range of filtration systems. Leviathan employees won’t like it, but if their other needs are satisfied, they won’t quit over air quality alone. Leviathan employees still need to use berths and the space disco and so forth, which need good air quality or else visitors will leave lower ratings, slowing down research. Leviathans could always tear down their entire filtration system once they unlock mechs, since their need for prestige is greatly reduced, but that’s risky since it will drastically slow the accumulation of prestige that could be used to unlock new combat upgrades.

Also, while this would potentially be too complex and stretching resources too thin for multiplayer games or scenarios where you fight an AI for control of a station, I think a singleplayer mission where you have to send mechs down to a planet to fight a battle on the surface could be cool.

The Eureker Station requires only two tweaks. First, in addition to the existing ability to have unresearched crates automatically dropped off in a research center as soon as they’re available, you should also be able to set a factory to produce crates of any type that you haven’t maxed out research for and which you don’t have enough to max out research for (i.e. the factory should be smart enough to check your storage and figure out if you need more crates or if you just need to wait for the research centers to get through them all). This way you can set a factory to process resources into unresearched crates and forget about it, and it will still keep your research stations busy. This allows you to scale up to having a lot of research stations without constantly having to do busywork.

The second tweak is that the Aurora and Star Hydra mech classes can only be unlocked at a research center. The Raptor class mech is already a trap option whose only advantages are speed, but only compared to other mechs so it’s still really slow, and crowd control, but security drones are so weak compared to mechs that any class can mulch through them no problem. I think giving its cone attack the ability to destroy plants and also allowing it to penetrate one bulkhead deep into enemy territory without paying to unlock the bulkhead for a proper invasion could make it useful as a bio deck raider, destroying a bunch of enemy plants to cut off their supply of minerals, medicine, or fibers (all three of which are required for the production of any mech class) could help make the Raptor less useless, but also it can be the starter mech whose main use is that you can get it as soon as you have a security station, while the Aurora and Star Hydra require going one tech tier higher to get a research center.

A third tweak is unnecessary but helps with the station’s vibe. The Eureker Station, like the Leviathan Station, starts out racing up the tech tree to get to its middlingly-lategame buildings that define its strategy, which means it wants a good earlygame fun deck to get prestige fast. For the Leviathan Station, I made this work with the vibe by making the earlygame fun deck a sort of space pirate den that gets phased into a more space Las Vegas vibe as mid-to-high tier buildings come online.

For the Eureker Station, I want a different look, so I’m going to add something to the communications center: Distress signals. Distress signals can be sent from colonies, ships, whatever, and allow you to exchange a bunch of resources or plants for prestige. The resources or plants required are random, and just like traders, you get more draws from the deck with more communication centers. Since half the distress signals ask for plants, that means the Dryad Station is the best positioned to answer them, but the Bug Station can answer half of them. This gives a new dynamic to the three earlygame stations that I like: The Telgor Station is the most aggressive of the earlygame stations, but has no access to prestige except the trickle that comes from positive ratings left by aliens who just want a bed to sleep in. The Dryad Station is the slowest of the earlygame stations to set up since it requires expanding both the sub deck and bio deck, but it has the best prestige income from both a minimalist fun deck (better than none at all, like the Telgor Station) and being able to answer distress signals. The Bug Station is in the middle – it spins up faster than the Dryad Station but slower than the Telgor Station, and its prestige income is in between the two as well. This means the Dryad Station is better at pivoting to a different build in the event that they aren’t able to secure victory in the earlygame.

This also means the Eureker Station can build itself on a Bug Station or a Dryad Station. You lose a little bit of speed racing up the tech tree, but you have an established production base to start producing crates for research the second your research centers come online.

Eurekers can use the hangar to attend a research conference and come back with one random research upgrade for anything you’ve unlocked. It takes longer and it keeps your eureker employees occupied just like they were working at a research center, but it doesn’t cost resources and it’s available much earlier, although not as soon as the hangar is unlocked, because eurekers don’t even show up at your station until you’ve unlocked the Tourist tech tier, which is when you get security stations and mechs, one tier up from the Package Traveler tier that gets you a hangar. Hangars and eureker employees only cost energy, though, not prestige, so you can use eureker shuttle expeditions to get your research going while you’re still accumulating prestige to unlock research centers.

The Eureker Station also really benefits from the same static defenses as the Hem’netjer Station. Once it gets its research centers stamped down, the Eureker Station is basically done constructing new buildings, focusing instead on improving what they already have. Since they’re not expanding, they can wall themselves in with turrets to create a nearly impenetrable defensive barrier for any Raptor or Aurora class mechs (although Star Hydras, being long range missile artillery who are specifically good at attacking buildings, can bombard the turrets from outside their effective range).

The Eureker Station is a compact lategame build that focuses on building tall, not wide. In the early game it focuses on racing up the tech tree, in the midgame it focuses on maximizing research, which is going to require some amount of sprawl as they make four or five different research centers, but then in the lategame they focus on having better buildings instead of more buildings. They don’t need additional medbays because their existing ones are so efficient, they don’t need to expand the fun deck because their entertainment buildings generate more energy per minute, they don’t need an extra factory because their first factory works twice as fast, and so on. The impact of the upgrades might need to be buffed to make this viable, I haven’t done the math, but the Eureker Station wins by slowly getting better at everything without spending any energy or prestige on it, then using the spare energy and prestige to build mechs that are slightly better than everyone else’s.

So in total you can have a telgor space flophouse, a bugrathorian trade hub, a dryad manufacturing center, a grey bioweapons lab, a eureker conventional weapons lab, a leviathan pirate port, a celebramer space Las Vegas, and a hem’netjer psychic space ritual to summon Cthulhu.

A lot of the space station builds sound similar to the premise of some of the game’s scenarios, but you end up building nearly the same station for each one. Sure, there’s a scenario about trade that requires you to buy and sell goods at a spacedock, but the game doesn’t give you the tools needed to build a trade-focused station. Using the spacedock requires a lot of micromanagement, so you either ignore it in any scenario that doesn’t require it or else you build one and interact with it sporadically, hoping to catch a trader who has something you actually want when they’re around, or use it purely to offload toxic waste (cleansed or not). Designing around the idea that it should be possible to build an entire space station around trade (or spirituality, or research, or whatever), not just have one trade building in your omni-station, significantly increases the depth of the game.

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.

Borderlands 3 had four DLC campaigns, plus the director’s cut and developer’s cut that had some extra side quests or something? Those last two sounded lame and they’re sold separately so I didn’t bother.

When I was discussing the DLC for Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and the Pre-Sequel, I noted that Borderlands 1 and 2’s DLCs (the Pre-Sequel barely had any) followed the same arc of quality: They started with DLC so heavy on jokes that it was clearly unimportant to the ongoing story to the point of being questionably canon, then slowly grew into being real stories which advanced the character arcs of major characters from the games. This reached its apogee in the last Borderlands 2 DLC, Commander Lilith, which was released five years after the others as a lead-in to Borderlands 3, and which seemed really focused on catching up people who played the shooters but not the adventure games on all the really critical plot developments of the adventure games – chiefly, that Scooter had died and Ellie was replacing him as the vehicle vendor.

Borderlands 3 did not follow this trajectory. The first and second DLC are important beats in the stories of Moxxi, Sir Hammerlock, and Wainwright Jakobs, while the third DLC then goes even further beyond to tell an almost Poe-faced western story. The side quests in the Bounty of Blood DLC are mostly written with the same tone as the rest of the game, but the main story is pretty much completely straight. That might work out if it was about a bunch of characters we’d already been introduced to having a dramatic beat, but it’s all new characters who don’t interact with the side quests at all, which means none of them get any jokes, which means they’re following the beats of a fairly rote and straightforward western story and I don’t care about any of them. Kind of feels like someone had an idea for an entirely different video game but all they could convince Gearbox to fund was a Borderlands 3 DLC.

Also, this is a much smaller issue but it bugged me, the whole story takes place on the planet of Gehenna, which is basically exactly the same as Pandora: A lawless fringe world dominated by deserts but with some other terrain mixed in. The inhabitants have a dash of Japanese culture mixed in with their US western, mostly in the architecture, and the backstory heavily features the Jakobs Corporation rather than Dahl, Atlas, or Hyperion, the three which heavily invested in Pandora, but it wouldn’t have changed anything to replace Jakobs’ involvement with Atlas or Hyperion, nor would it have changed much to have this section of the planet have been a Jakobs outpost back in the day. Hyperion and Atlas both made an effort to be the exclusive power on Pandora, but neither of them were ultimately successful and since Dahl’s reign was before the first game, it’s not clear they even tried. Also, Atlas’ reign over Pandora seems to have been mostly nominal, with nearly the entire population refusing to recognize their authority and Atlas presence being confined to their own forward attack bases rather than controlling any pre-existing population centers. Bottom line, you wouldn’t even have to use a different corporation instead of Jakobs for the backstory if you set Bounty of Blood on Pandora, there’s plenty of times and places where Jakobs might’ve run a research facility without the current dominant power noticing or caring.

Then in the Krieg DLC they snap back from this to the same tone as the first two DLCs and the base game, and also they basically do the Pre-Sequel’s Claptrap DLC again but better. The Claptrap DLC was okay, marred mainly by its terrible final boss, and the Krieg DLC does a good job improving on it, although its final boss is more “at least it’s not Shadow Trap” as opposed to actually being good. Overall, though, it’s a perfectly good excuse to shoot some more guys, and also a pretty good way to explore the character of Krieg. Borderlands has a weird thing where the player characters are a few combat barks away from being complete ciphers in the game where they’re playable but get to have real character arcs and fully fleshed out personalities once some sequels roll around, so the Krieg DLC of Borderlands 3 is when Krieg, playable in Borderlands 2, gets to explore any of the concepts brought up in his announcement trailer.

It’s kind of clumsily handled, but I don’t know how you could do it better given the gameplay premise of Borderlands. Krieg gets reduced to being a side character in his own story, but Borderlands has never had major speaking roles for playable characters (they didn’t have any dialogue besides combat barks in Borderlands 1 or 2) nor would it be a good idea to require playing as Krieg for the Krieg DLC (which would also require porting him into Borderlands 3, but that wouldn’t be a terrible idea). Krieg’s whole premise in his (very well-received) announcement trailer is that somewhere inside of him is a conscious mind desperately trying to scrap back together some semblance of a normal life and human connection, but every time he opens his mouth to speak, vaguely related gibberish laden with metaphors of carnage and rot comes out instead, and he has difficulty holding himself back from acts of random violence. In the DLC, this gets translated into “sane Krieg,” the internal monologue from the trailer, and “psycho Krieg,” the gibbering external dialogue.

The announcement trailer had sane Krieg talking to psycho Krieg, trying to tell him to say and do things, and psycho Krieg would only sometimes and only barely cooperate, but psycho Krieg never talked back. So the implication is that sane Krieg is the conscious mind trying desperately to ram commands through instincts so overpowering that the conscious mind exerts only limited control over his own body. But in order to make that work in a DLC, they had to make sane Krieg and psycho Krieg separate characters who can talk to each other where the playable characters can hear it (brainscanning technology is involved, so these two still share a body), at which point the fight to be understood is immediately over. Still a fun DLC to play through (until the last boss, which was dull but easy, so at least I got through it in one go), but the only way to make this DLC work was to play it from Krieg’s perspective, and Borderlands’ mechanics just don’t support a specific character being the only playable character – even if Krieg were playable in Borderlands 3, I’m playing as Moze for a reason and I don’t want to trade my giant mech suit for whatever Krieg does.

Also it bugs me that the experiment that ruined Krieg’s psyche was committed by Hyperion using their robot army. The robot army was Handsome Jack’s thing, we see it get created in the Pre-Sequel, which is after Borderlands 1, which already has psychos! The Borderlands bandits are explicitly a consequence of Dahl importing a bunch of violent criminals for use as prison labor and then turning them loose when they abandoned the planet, so why wouldn’t this unethical experiment to create a common bandit enemy type have been their doing? This is a nitpick, they already had assets for Hyperion units but not for Dahl ones (the Dahl guys in the Pre-Sequel are in the old engine) and that is probably the reason why they used Hyperion, plus, Krieg is playable in Borderlands 2 which features Hyperion as a major antagonist, so giving Krieg a grievance with the Hyperion corporation adds to replays of the game he’s featured in, whereas Dahl has never really been an antagonist (the closest are the Lost Legion in the Pre-Sequel, who are ex-Dahl and who never appear in a game where Krieg is playable). It’s easy to figure out a reason for this, we know almost nothing about Dahl’s reign over Pandora so it’s totally possible that Hyperion had research facilities set up on the planet before they became the dominant power.

Backing up to the Moxxi DLC, this one puts the lie from the Pre-Sequel DLC that you get to play as Handsome Jack in the grave. In Borderlands 2, Handsome Jack had body doubles, and in the Pre-Sequel, you’re on Jack’s side, so one of the DLC characters for TPS was one of Jack’s body doubles. But that’s not how they advertised it. They said you get to play as Jack. I guess they didn’t want to rewrite the game to accommodate Jack’s presence in the party (it’s a plot point that he’s separated from the party early on and would’ve been moderately difficult to rewrite the entry into Concordia around that – but only moderately), but then the entire character is built around being Handsome Jack, with skill trees that revolve around having money and Hyperion connections and stuff. Why would Timothy, the doppelganger, have any greater access to that than any of his other employees, which is the entire party?

The Moxxi DLC for Borderlands 3 makes Timothy his own character, hiding out in Handsome Jack’s space Las Vegas resort, which was abandoned after his death leaving all of the tourists and employees stranded. Moxxi wants it for herself, so you go in to get access to Handsome Jack’s master control panel on her behalf, and along the way meet Timothy, the last Jack body double, who everyone wants to kill because everyone hates Jack and he looks like Jack and hey, that’s good enough. It’s not a terrible DLC, I like the aesthetic of the decadent resort struck by the post-apocalypse, and Timothy is pretty good as his own character. It’s not this DLC’s fault that the Doppelganger DLC for TPS was a lie.

Guns, Love, and Tentacles might be the best Borderlands I’ve ever played. Worth noting here that I haven’t played the Tales adventure games, which I’ve heard do much more interesting things with the setting and characters compared to the main games, so if I’d played those it might plausibly wreck the curve for how good Tentacles is, since most of what punches Tentacles up is that it’s a good story. It’s definitely not a particularly epic story. Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs are getting married, because Borderlands decided that 2019 was the best year to pivot their series about fighting evil space corporations to a neoliberal story of defeating an evil corporate nepobaby who runs a weapons manufacturing company to instead install the good corporate nepobaby in charge of the weapons manufacturing company. It feels kind of weird to criticize Borderlands for being out of step with the popular zeitgeist anyway, since their usual problem is being performatively zealous in their support of it, but “arms manufacturers are good actually” doesn’t seem like an intentional statement so much as something they blundered into because they needed some way to knock the Jakobs corporation out of the fight against the Calypso twins and “install good guy nepobaby” is an uncomplicated way to do that.

Anyway, the power struggle for the Jakobs corporation is all in the base game, by the time we get to the Tentacles DLC the only way you can tell Wainwright is a corporate nepobaby is that his last name is Jakobs and that is the name of one of the arms manufacturers on the guns you’re looting. So instead this is the story of how Anarky Gaige, one of the DLC characters from Borderlands 2, is now a heavily armed wedding planner who needs your help with some heavily armed wedding arrangements, and then things get even more complicated because the venue is full of Lovecraftian-looking horrors including a cult that tries to possess one of the grooms.

Emphasis is firmly on Lovecraftian-looking, as the aesthetic is well-represented and all the highlights of Lovecraft’s fiction are referenced in various enemies and side quests, but the themes aren’t really Lovecraftian. It’s not that Lovecraft’s themes of madness in the face of human insignificance or racial purity being an impossible dream in a world of inescapable corruption are rejected, they just aren’t raised at all. The Lovecraft references go beyond Innsmouth and Rl’yeh to include B-tier locations like the Mountain of Madness, but there’s not really any engagement with the deeper themes even when things start getting less comedic and more intense in the climax. This was definitely a good idea (Borderlands doesn’t have the right tone for these themes at all, whether it’s reaffirming or rejecting them), but I can’t tell if it was done because it’s a good idea or because the writers missed the themes of Lovecraft’s work entirely. Wouldn’t be the first time, but also, the themes of Lovecraft are the subject of Discourse so it feels weird that Gearbox wouldn’t have heard about that.

Either way, the quality of the Borderlands 3 DLCs is kind of all over the place, but mostly good. They’re only sold in bundled sets now (and there’s a season two bundle that I’m not getting because it looks bad, so I won’t be commenting on that), which means if you want Tentacles and the Handsome Jackpot you are stuck with Bounty of Blood and Krieg. The latter two aren’t abominable, so if you really want to shoot more doods after doing the rest, they’ll do, but in terms of “is the season 1 pack worth it,” I can only recommend the first two DLC as a thing you should buy with money, at which point you may as well play the others if you aren’t tired of Borderlands by the time you get there.

I complained about team colors in the StarCraft campaign, because the Terran campaign set up the expectation that these would be consistent and tell you something about the enemy you were fighting and then the Zerg and Protoss campaigns dropped that and it was annoying. Going into Brood War, there isn’t really any good reason to expect Zerg team colors to actually match up to specific broods or Protoss tribes to mean anything at all, because you already saw them not do that in the core campaign. But just for the sake of wringing an extra blog post out of the game, how well does Brood War treat team colors?

Continue reading “Team Colors in Brood War” →

I’ve now played Borderlands 3, which means I’ve played every shooter-looter in the Borderlands series. I haven’t played either Tales From the Borderlands game, and it turns out those are actually fairly important to the series, so this isn’t really a complete series retrospective. The shooter-looters do still stand on their own, but characters from the shooters have major character beats in Tales (Scooter died, apparently), and characters from Tales show up with major roles in Borderlands 3. Like, apparently some guy named Rhys took over Atlas Corporation to rebuild it after it somehow got completely deep-sixed on Pandora (a Soviets-in-Afghanistan situation, I guess? Atlas’ headquarters certainly wasn’t on the planet and it didn’t seem like Commandant Steele and General Knoxx was their entire command staff, even if it did seem like some of their most elite forces were being poured into the debacle). Borderlands 3 presents that straightforwardly enough that I didn’t feel lost, but it also definitely seems like this was the plot of Tales From The Borderlands.

Borderlands 3 is, for the most part, a worthy successor to Borderlands 2 – although that statement comes with the qualifier that I wasn’t as impressed with Borderlands 2 as a lot of people. Just like 2, some of 3’s jokes landed, about as many of them missed, and I don’t think it really lives up to being a “comedy game” so much as a lighthearted game, but that was always true and being a lighthearted, mechanically fun shooter is exactly what I wanted from the series anyway. The plot is little more than an excuse to string together gun battles, but the gun battles are fun, so that is sufficient. The villains are really annoying and non-threatening which is jarring to people who were hoping for another Handsome Jack, but the NPC allies are much better at expressing personality and feeling like they’re actually doing something, so I’m calling it a wash.

Don’t get me wrong, the Calypso twins have repetitive dialogue and their constant act of being too cool to care even when they’re being repeatedly handed significant defeats is, yes, in-character with being self-absorbed streamer narcissists, but that still leaves them with garbage dialogue. I can’t even tell if the way they’re aggressively unfazed by the loss of one corporate ally after another is supposed to indicate that they’re detached from reality or if it’s an ineffective attempt to make them seem more threatening by blowing off the significance of their setbacks. But, like, they clearly demonstrate investment in those corporate allies before their respective schemes go tits up, and it’s not like the protagonists or their NPC allies are the ones trying to convince the Calypso twins that these setbacks are a big deal – the Calypsos go out of their way to belabor how totally unaffected they are by the defeat of their latest ally. Given the level of subtlety the average Borderlands writer operates on, I’d expect a friendly NPC to be very explicit about how the Calypsos are bluffing if that’s what was meant, but they absolutely do come across like they’re bluffing.

But the Borderlands series had exactly one good villain and even Handsome Jack’s writing is overhyped. If you decided from that one guy that Borderlands is a series with cool villains, then I get why the Calypsos were a huge disappointment, but Borderlands is fun because it is fun to shoot a Jason Voorhees cosplayer so hard that guns and money come exploding out of his ribcage, and Borderlands 3 continues to serve up cool characters with cool powers to play as and cool locations with cool enemies in them to fight against.

The monster designs are still good, and going to lots of new planets meant lots of excuses for cool new monsters, especially on Eden-6. “Add dinosaurs” isn’t extraordinarily creative, but it still works. Dinosaurs are super cool, adding them improves the game. The variety of different planets makes it easier for the game to hard-cut between very different moods, from Borderlands-classic on Pandora to knock-down corporate warfare on Meridian to remote, monster-infested wilderness on Eden-6. Borderlands 2 was also good at having much more environmental variety and atmosphere compared to the very same-y original, and this is only enhanced in Borderlands 3.

The character design of the protagonists and the more human enemies is also really good, the characters are all really distinctive, they have a simple but well-expressed personality, and they have distinctive skills some of which are gobs of fun to play with, while others are kind of lame. Every Borderlands game has a character whose unique powers are kind of lame – Maya in 2, Aurelia in the Pre-Sequel, everyone but Lilith in the original – and this time it’s Amara. I guess after Lilith was the only character with fun powers in Borderlands 1, sirens are now banned from having cool powers that do anything. On the other end, Moze demonstrates how to do a straightforward guns-and-grenades character right: By giving them an awesome robot suit to stomp around in (or more broadly, by turning some part of their standard soldier kit up to eleven).

The loot colors were completely detached from the actual quality of the loot, though. Gold drops mean basically nothing in this game because there’s no reason to believe they’ll be particularly better than the blues or purples. You have to compare the stats yourself and ultimately trying the new gun out is the only way to know for sure. This was always true to some extent, the AI/RNG couldn’t reliably tell you which weapon was better than which, so sometimes a gold drop would be crap because it was a whole much less than the sum of its parts. Not usually, though, you could use the color scale to sort your weapons on a first pass and 99% of the time, it would work. Sure, if you auto-sell every white weapon you find then once every 100 guns you will sell one that’s actually good without even looking at it, and over the course of a campaign that might happen 4 or 5 times, but it’s a huge time savings to only look at blues and purples. But in Borderlands 3, you have to at least glance at everything because the colors will lie to you. I wound up using a strategy of selling everything unless one of my weapons was starting to feel weak, and then looking only at weapons of that type to replace it, and that worked out, but the color grading system is supposed to solve this problem, it worked fine in previous games, and in 3 it’s ineffective.

Vehicle gameplay is pretty limited, which is a problem every Borderlands has had. Over the course of the entire series, they’ve got tons of interesting vehicles, but they only ever have three to a game. In gun design, Borderlands is happy to go absolutely gonzo with more guns than you could ever make use of, giving you a constant stream of new weapons to suit any playstyle, but for some reason they’re much more stingy with vehicles. The vehicles can be custom-modded now, but finding vehicle parts is so rare that I found less than half of them by the end of the campaign. None of them make massive changes to the vehicle, anyway. You can get different types of bombs to lob out of your technical, but you can’t get a missile launcher or a tank cannon, so it never feels like heavy armor to me despite fulfilling that role mechanically. The cyclone is really cool, at least, but that came up on the second planet of five and then vehicle gameplay didn’t really evolve past that. No tanks for the corporate warfare on Meridian (like they had in the General Knoxx DLC), no speedboats or hovercraft for the jungles of Eden-6 (like they had in the Hammerlock DLC). Every Borderlands game is like this, but over the course of all the games and DLCs they’ve made more than enough vehicles to solve this problem, they just refuse to put all of them into one game. Is it really had to add vehicles to these games for some reason, to the point where adding in another three or four would be a major investment of resources?

Lilith’s sacrifice at the end was also pretty meh. Felt like it came out of nowhere, Lilith using siren powers she didn’t have up until that moment to solve a problem that only cropped up in the last ten minutes of the game and which apparently cost her life. Her whole character up until that point was about not having her powers and being stuck purely in a command role, and using her powers so hard they kill her as soon as she gets them back doesn’t really pay that off. Like, Lilith doesn’t like being depowered, but then the very first thing she does when she gets her powers back is kill herself with them. To save the world and all, it’s a heroic sacrifice, not a suicide, but it still grates against what her character arc had been up to that point.

Ava’s bit about being an apprentice vault hunter has a few good beats, but never really goes anywhere. Lilith kind of implies she has command of the Sanctuary III (the starship that the Crimson Raiders are flying around in to have space adventures), which, like, Mordecai, Axton, Salvatore, Gaige, Moxxi, Ellie, and any of the player characters would’ve been a better choice for that, along with probably Zer0, although he’s hanging out in Meridian, not the Sanctuary III, so he might not be available. Even Brick might be a better choice, he did lead a bandit clan in Borderlands 2 and while he wasn’t especially effective, he was able to hold things together, which is still plausibly putting him ahead of the kid who went on her first full-fledged vault hunter mission last Tuesday. Ava is almost literally the worst person in the roster to give command to, although she is at least an obvious improvement over Krieg, Claptrap, Tannis, and also Marcus, though in the latter case only because I get the feeling he would turn it down anyway.

Ava hasn’t had any major character beats since the death of her mentor Maya (there’s some side quest stuff that fleshes her character arc out, but doesn’t advance it), so I guess we’re just supposed to assume she grew into a command role offscreen at some point in the three and a half planets’ worth of content we’ve had since then? She just kinda hung out on the ship for pretty much all of that.

But Borderlands’ writing has always been hit-or-miss, and its greatest strength is that comedy comes in threes, so it’s easy to build a side quest around a joke, and Borderlands 3 is still good at that. The jokes average out to decent but not amazing, but building side quests around jokes means that the side quests have a reliable setup-repetition-twist structure that can be stamped down anywhere and as long as you use a different joke for each one, it doesn’t get repetitive.

I think Borderlands 3 wasn’t as well-received as Borderlands 2 pretty much purely because it had been 7 years and the culture had moved on. Borderlands 3 is good at the same things Borderlands 2 was good at, and it was bad at the same things Borderlands 2 was bad at. The saturation of magenta games had just rendered Borderlands 3 a pretty completely unexceptional entry in the genre.