IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of Spacebase Startopia in About 3 Minutes!
58**Read pinned comment** A detailed review of Spacebase Startopia in about 3 minutes! We make game reviews without the fluff.
Starbase Startopia is a real time strategy and management game that let’s you build and manage an alien space station by creating rooms, collecting garbage, fending off attacks from pirates and generally trying to full fill the needs of your demanding alien guests.
It was released in March this year and it’s based on the original Startopia from 2001. Some of the developers that worked on the original game came from Bulldog Productions, the guys that made Theme Hospital, and you can definitely see some similarities between them, like the way you plan certain rooms using a blueprint and the larger than life animations that help bring the game to life.
Now where most RTS games take place from a birds eye view looking down on a flat map, Startopia uses a circular map filled with compartments spread across 3 decks, and each compartment is divided by bulkheads which you can unlock to expand your base. You place all your buildings and furniture in a fairly narrow, ring shaped corridor that effectively loops all the way around to form a circle, with elevators taking your guests and workers between the 3 decks.
Still with me? I hope so, because trying to make this make sense is hard work. Now each of the 3 decks has a speciality that limits which buildings and rooms can be placed there. The first deck is the sub deck area with essential stuff like medical rooms, charging bays for your robotic workers known as fuzzies, security buildings where criminals are detained and so on.
The second level is the fun deck where more upper class guests can go to enjoy a disco, play in the arcade to satisfy their need for gaming, win hats in the lootbox lottery and grab a drink at the cat cafe. The third deck is the bio deck where you can do some light terraforming to grow different types of plants to produce stuff like oxygen to keep the air flowing, aswell as minerals to make circuit boards and a few other different things that can be turned into finished products in the factory.
The shape of the map is a bit weird and at first it can feel really weird as you pan around and the walls and floor curve around you, and I can’t help but think that making it a flat surface would just work better all around, since as it is it’s a pretty narrow building area that makes it difficult to fit in all the different rooms you need to run a successful base, and things like billboards and plant pots take up an enormous amount of the already limited space.
After going through the 5 or 6 optional tutorial missions you’re let loose to run your own starbase in the 10 mission campaign, with each mission generally giving you a different goal or aspect of your tourists needs to manage, but every mission basically involves building a very similar base to the last just with a slightly different objective at the end of it like researching a certain amount of building upgrades or building a robust security network with the goal of rehabilitating criminals which really isn’t very advanced or difficult to achieve.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the game for me was the combat which feels extremely clunky, unresponsive and basically offers little to no challenge since you just tell your security drones or mech where to go and basically just leave them to it. Drones are produced automatically at the security station and there’s 3 different types of mechs to build with each one having a slightly different weapon load out and taking a trivial amount of resources to build.
Some of the other issues I have with it is the room designs which feel crowded with random machines placed anywhere and everywhere to try to fit in as many as possible to maximise efficiency without any thought giving to beautification since there’s not even a basic selection of furniture to make your rooms your own which ends up just looking overly simple and a bit lazy.
There’s no way to prioritize certain tasks or set up a schedule for your workers either so they often just walk around picking up garbage instead of prioritizing the rapidly decaying crate on the bio deck. To be fair though, garbage is recycled into energy at the recycling plant, and since energy is basically your money it’s still good to have, but it would be nice to be able to set certain workers to only carry out certain tasks rather than having no control over them whatsoever.
The micro management is a bit extreme too mostly because of how fast garbage accumulates, aswell as having to deal with an almost constant supply of staff promotions and pop-ups from different events taking place around the base, and you should expect to have to pick up a lot of crates and garbage yourself by left clicking and dropping them where you want them...
#SpacebaseStartopia #3minutegamereviews #videogames
Other Videos By RedcoatViking
Other Statistics
Spacebase Startopia Statistics For RedcoatViking
RedcoatViking currently has 2,703 views spread across 1 video for Spacebase Startopia. Less than an hour worth of Spacebase Startopia videos were uploaded to his channel, making up less than 0.12% of the total overall content on RedcoatViking's YouTube channel.