The biggest issue outside of the somewhat clumsy control / UI is that the AI tends to be a bit unpredictable. When all of its parts are working in harmony, Spacebase Startopia is a pretty entertaining little sim. You use energy to create buildings, you have bots and aliens performing various tasks along the way and you have to try and find that sweet spot between productivity and happiness with a bit of RTS combat tossed in for good measure. To its credit, the three different levels in Spacebase Startopia each serve a different purpose, and the resource management / inhabitant happiness / expansion tug-of-war is a pretty well-balanced one most of the time. I get that space stations probably can’t ‘grow’ quite so easily, but there is a sense of confinement to how the playing field is structured that just made Spacebase Startopia a little less satisfying by comparison. There’s a satisfying feeling that comes with watching a province grow in strategy games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or watching your dungeon in Dungeons III expand as you carve out more passages and rooms. That being said, the view is restricted to just the three floors and there’s no real sense of growth to the station itself. They’re bright and colorful, with lots of little aliens bopping around my three floored station. That is a shame too, because I enjoyed the visuals of Spacebase Startopia quite a bit. Menus are dense, sometimes you need to use two buttons to bounce around them effectively and moving around the screen with the left stick sometimes does zooming in and out instead of actually panning about, making the camera a sometimes annoying enemy to wrestle with. This is something I often am a proponent of – I want to see more strategy titles brought over to consoles as that is my preferred platform, but I will admit that the controls were a bit finicky for me at times. This is a pretty complex simulation game, and it does feel as though it was built with PC in mind and then ported to a variety of consoles. You want to play the tutorial once things get fired up – because there is a lot here. They have a somewhat dark sense of humor, and I generally appreciated it here – though I thought it was generally better done in Dungeons I,II and III. That kind of slapstick humor is going to be hit and miss with people, but this is the same development team that brought us the three Dungeons games. However, I can’t help but come away with the feeling that this has all been done better in other games. It has a quirky sense of humor, falls into the strategy / sim genre that I enjoy so much and the science fiction setting give the developers all of the flexibility in the world (or perhaps space, as it were) to be creative. On its surface, Spacebase Startopia should be a lot of fun. Spacebase Startopia by developer Realmforge Studios and publisher Kalypso Media- Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.
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