Spacebase Startopia is a real-time strategy/simulation game inspired by (but not directly connected to) a quirky 2001 game called Startopia. After trying to wrap my head around the rights situation, I’m perfectly fine calling this a spiritual sequel and washing my hands of the details. I’ve never actually played Startopia, with RTS games being one of my weaker genres, but Spacebase Startopia looked too colorful and interesting to pass up. Somehow, I managed to beat the entire game without having to lower the difficulty. There were a few points where I considered it, though, with a notable difficulty spike in mission 8 causing several frustrating game overs and situations where my opponent could wear me down through attrition.

Almost every time, the problem was that I didn’t understand part of the game. The most embarrassing example of this was when I discovered that I had neglected two entire pages of research topics because I didn’t notice that they were tabbed at the top. Even after a dedicated tutorial and several early missions that function as another tutorial, figuring out Spacebase Startopia often feels like playing an obtusely old-school game without the benefit of a manual. That underlying complexity is also its greatest strength, however, because it allows the game to have a sense of constant discovery. At one point, I screwed up my early construction and left no room for the teleporter you need to move your hardier security mechs between decks, which came back to bite me when some bug-like creatures on another deck attacked. Around the same time, however, religious extremists planted a bomb, so I grabbed it and dropped it next to the bugs. This wouldn’t have eliminated them in most games. It worked here.

I don’t know why morally dubious AI assistants are so great, but VAL steals the show

Ever since 2007’s Portal, the gaming industry has had something of a fascination with the concept of quirky, wistfully genocidal AI helpers. There’s just something about transplanting what would be overwhelmingly negative human traits into an upbeat computer that works. Spacebase Startopia‘s AI assistant is named VAL and shares many of the same merciless, patronizing qualities that made Portal‘s characters so memorable, and it serves as a constant voice in your ear, keeping you apprised of your successes and failures and finding opportunities to make your successes feel like failures.

You’re provided with three options for VAL’s voice—GLaWIN (inspired by Portal’s GLaDOS), Robot, and VAL9000—and I personally opted for Robot. GLaWIN sounded a little too Portal-y, and the pitch modulation can become annoying when the voice is chiming in as frequently as VAL does through the game’s 10 single-player missions. VAL9000, on the other hand, wasn’t quite robotic enough. For me, the Robot voice setting was a happy medium, sounding more natural while still sporting artifacts reminiscent of early text-to-speech programs. Of course, if you end up hating every voice, you can also select “none” to render it mute, though I can’t help but feel that this would lessen the impact of VAL’s endless antagonism.

You play as Command-R, an up-and-coming commander who’s being trained to manage Startopia bases. Command-R’s career and story advance as you progress through the missions, with some story developments being hinted at by offhand comments VAL makes every so often, but none of this is the primary focus. Instead, the meat of the writing consists of being told what to do in each mission, things eventually going awry, and then VAL rubbing it in with the hostile computer program equivalent of a sarcastic slow clap. It’s glorious.

VAL’s criticisms are tailored to each mission, allowing for many of them to reflect the stupid things you may do. When I chose to build a mech during a mission that had no combat, it was there to congratulate me and point out that I had wasted resources on something pointless.

It also greets you upon starting the game. I was playing Spacebase Startopia at various times in the morning and night, trying to finish the campaign and have a review ready before the embargo lifted, and I started to suspect that VAL’s greetings were reading my system clock and giving me different lines based on when I launched the game. It’s hard to be sure whether it got lucky with some generic comments or if it truly does give you different welcomes at different times of the day, but I suspect that it’s the latter, and that’s pretty cool. There aren’t many games that do this.

It’s easy to neglect things in Spacebase Startopia, but figuring that out is part of the fun

I’m not going to sit here and act like I’ve figured out everything about Spacebase Startopia because I haven’t. Building things is stated to reduce your maximum energy (currency) while hiring aliens to work at the various places you build requires a one-time fee, and yet your energy fluctuates up and down even if you don’t build Energy Distributors (which the tutorial states drain your energy). I never managed to pin down a culprit so that I could optimize my building approach. I couldn’t even find a meter that tracked how much energy I was gaining and losing per second. However, I did eventually figure out how to keep my visitor satisfaction in the 80-90% positive range, and since happy visitors are more likely to spend energy, this draining was only a problem on rare occasions. It’s strange; I usually feel my way through games, but that’s almost never the intended approach.

Spacebase Startopia wears a lot of hats, and its single-player campaign keeps things fresh by focusing on one or two hats at a time. Usually, the goal is to build your space station out and fulfill the needs of visitors, which earns you Prestige points. These Prestige points can be used to buy one-use items (usually to help you get out of a pinch), or more practically, to unlock new constructions which may themselves be a prerequisite of whatever building you’re tasked with unlocking.

Startopia bases are unique in that they’re donut-shaped, so moving from room to room will eventually lead you back to the room where you started. That doesn’t happen often in the single-player campaign, however, since you’re usually limited to 1-3 rooms. Most missions give you access to all three decks, though, and these are helpfully broken down into different functions. The Bio deck grows plants that then produce resources, for example. Hiring a certain type of alien will result in them automatically growing and harvesting the plants, after which your robot helpers will collect the resources and store them away in a Cargo Hold (provided that you’ve built one).

The starting deck is the Sub Deck, and it’s where visitors first arrive. You can only produce mechs and drones on this deck. Hospitals can also only appear on this deck. That just leaves the Fun Deck, which is where visitors go dancing and drinking and gambling. The Fun Deck is where visitors will be most willing to spend their energy. Spacebase Startopia‘s main challenge is one of optimization; if you’ve focused on the Fun Deck to the exclusion of the Sub Deck, there will be fewer aliens around to enjoy all of the things you’ve built. If you ignore the Fun Deck, on the other hand, you’ll obtain energy less quickly and visitors will become frustrated and angry. The Bio Deck is the safest to ignore since it’s largely automated once you hire workers, but it’s crucial for producing the oxygen that atmosphere-fixing devices require, as well as the raw tools needed to construct mechs.

Changing the goal at the end of a mission, attrition, and vermin and bomb hunting

As I mentioned earlier, I struggled a bit with mission 8 because I was missing out on two entire menus of things that could be unlocked with Prestige. That’s pretty huge since unlocking things automatically gives you 3,000 energy. It wasn’t the first time I missed a tab in Spacebase Startopia, either; it took me way too long to figure out that you have to hit a side-tab when clicking on a factory in order to queue whatever you want to produce.

The underlying problem with mission 8 is that it’s set up as a race between you and an AI-powered commander to see who can produce the most energy. That’s true and you get a game over if you fail to produce energy faster than your opponent, but once you succeed, an extra goal is added that requires taking over an area with military force. Building the mechs and drones required for that victory requires a pretty huge detour and lots of natural resources, and I simply didn’t have any of the things required on my first attempt. By that point, my energy was draining almost as quickly as it came in and it would have taken forever to afford all of the buildings I needed, so I started over from the beginning of the mission.

My second and third attempts saw me barely lose to my opponent’s superior energy-gathering until I realized that I could use unlocks to secure a narrow victory. A similar approach was required for mission 9, which tasks you with conquering three other rival commanders who are expanding their bases on other parts of the ship. The first two commanders went down relatively easily, only for the third to hit me with various methods of sabotage. It couldn’t stand against me militarily, so it chose to drain my resources so that I couldn’t afford to open the door to them. Attrition isn’t fun, and it was only when I reloaded a save and used saved-up Prestige points to unlock a bunch of things that I could afford to open the door to finish it off.

Speaking of things that I don’t find fun in Spacebase Startopia, the whole “hunt for a random object somewhere near your buildings” mechanic is annoying. Every so often, you’ll be warned that your opponent has placed a device that siphons your energy, or someone will place a bomb somewhere on your base. The first time you encounter each of these, you have no way of knowing what they look like, so you’re left to scour absurdly busy scenes full of visitors playing the devil’s Where’s Waldo. And sometimes, enemies will sabotage you by placing garbage all over, overwhelming your ability to get rid of it. Then vermin appear from the garbage and create more of it, and before you know it, you’re overrun with the things and can’t find and remove them faster than they appear. I can roll with difficult mechanics, but hunting for objects is annoying-difficult.

Spacebase Startopia‘s visuals and music are good, but it’s hard to focus on them

The lack of a pause button makes it exceedingly difficult to sit back and enjoy the little touches in Spacebase Startopia. I never felt like I had time to follow a visitor around or sit back and appreciate the visuals and music. However, my first mission 8 failure had me so far ahead of my opponent toward the end that I was finally able to appreciate the space whale thing I had constructed for visitors, as well as the beautiful chaos of the various buildings I had constructed on the Fun Deck. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is a pleasant companion throughout the game, but I’m finding it difficult to remember anything specific about it without referencing any of the videos I recorded. The Sub Deck has one of my favorite tracks in the entire game, but I was always so rushed to get things built that the only music I can remember offhand is the beginning of a track that plays on the Fun Deck.

Story: 3/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Spacebase Startopia review. It took me 19 hours to finish all 10 missions, though about 5 hours of that was just me repeatedly failing at mission 8 before figuring it out.

Spacebase Startopia review – VALiantly old-school first appeared on Killa Penguin