Startopia (PC) Review

Nothing says early 2000s like a simulation game. With titles like Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 being a bestseller at the time, Startopia, a simulation game with a great and complicated sandbox plus some fun missions to put hours into with complicated goals and a fun story progression, must have looked like the future of gaming. However, heavy and complicated simulation games are a part of the genre that eventually died and disappeared. In Startopia there might rest a clue to why that is and why it did end up appealing to a wider audience.

It all starts off with a great in-depth tutorial about the cameras, how to build, and how to trade to get a solid foundation to stand on to start off the game. This is a much needed feature as there are many heavy mechanics to keep track of. However, once a mission starts, it becomes quickly apparent that the tutorials did not teach anything at all about the action and barely anything at all about what the facilities do. It is all something that must be learned through the missions themselves, which can create a very confusing experience.

While this was very welcomed in the golden age of simulators, it is something that has not aged very well. Nowadays, it is common gaming design sense that what everything does should be clearly marked. Startopia is too much about figuring out what to do alone, and small mistakes can lead to stages taking hours longer to complete.

All the negatives and aged game design choices aside, there are a lot of great things within, such as its multi-layered and diverse missions. In one mission, the goal is to build and run a prison and prevent outbreaks by building security bots, only for the next one to be about putting up a research facility to discover new technologies. It creates a diverse experience that never feels stale.

The issue, though, with the missions is while they are diverse in their nature and the buildings required are all different, they do come with too far-fetched goals. In the prison quest, for example, 100 criminals must be dealt with. This is something that even with full efficiency will take at least a couple of hours of just sitting there and playing the waiting game for the numbers to tick up to 100 prisoners cured. Mix this with the fact that supervision must be given to keep track of whether or not there is an outbreak and adapt to that, creates an experience that too much of the time is just like watching paint dry. While the initial building is very fun and engaging, it is also only a small part of the gameplay in Startopia and most of the time will be spent sitting and watching as goals are reached. It is boring and too slow in places. What separates Startopia from titles that have better survived the test of time is the fact that those games offer a lot to do besides the mission at hand. However, Startopia does nothing but that mission outside of the sandbox mode, which creates boring gameplay.

Startopia is a title that has a great concept yet comes with weird design choices that might have made sense at its time but nowadays are seen as nothing but a nuisance. No one is going to gladly watch paint dry like they did in the early 2000s when these kinds of games were highly fashionable. Startopia is a product of its time and clearly has not been treated well as the years have gone by. Back in 2000s, this game might very well have appeared to be the future when developers tried to create smart and complex systems to try the game's logical engines. In today's world, though, it just turns into a game that is a bore, with 90% of the time being spent waiting for the number to reach the goal. It is boring and gets stale extremely fast and the 10% spent building will not cover up for that, sadly.