Hands OnStartopia

Eidos recently provided us with an early version of Startopia, a game set on a space station that takes its inspiration from games like SimTheme Park and Dungeon Keeper. We've had the opportunity to run through several of the introductory levels of the game and the freestyle sandbox mode. The object of the game is to build and manage a space station to suit the needs of numerous wacky alien visitors. You'll need to set up a variety of facilities to employ, entertain, and satisfy the current alien visitors, whose preferences and physical needs can vary as widely as their appearances.

The space station itself is a large torus with three levels: a large cargo and industrial deck, a commercial deck, and the biodeck, which is filled with different animal and plants species that react to the customizable climate settings. In addition to expanding up through the station, you can open up the section doors into new segments of the station's curved hull. As is typical of sim games, you must expand carefully until you can support the cost with commercial facilities, which let you collect the game's single resource - energy - from visiting aliens. In the single-player campaign, you also compete with AI-controlled opponents building elsewhere in the station that may fight with you or trade with you, depending on how they feel about the aliens your station sections harbor.

This orbital alien society is rendered in a fully 3D engine that is capable of zooming from the station's exterior to a close-up of your extraterrestrial menagerie. This 3D environment is perhaps the first to represent the curved decks so often described in sci-fi novels, and the aliens themselves seem to be inspired by a wide variety of sources, including the Star Wars cantina scene. The topmost station level, the biodeck, adds a surprisingly natural and organic aspect to your station. The rolling terrain can be raised and lowered in real-time, even as butterflies flit around trees and plants sway in a gentle breeze.

Startopia, quietly announced by Eidos at E3 last May, is the work of UK-based Mucky Foot Productions, a studio that was formed in 1997 by former Bullfrog employees. Though Eidos had previously planned for Startopia to ship at the end of this year, the game's release has now slipped to next February.