Space Colony: Steam Edition Review (PC)

good
key review info
  • Game: Space Colony: Steam Edition
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: No
  • Reviewed on:
Space Colony: Steam Edition screenshot

Space Colony: Steam Edition brings the original simulation game to Steam some 12 years after its initial release.

The new launch is a remastering of the sci-fi base building and management game from FireFly Studios, an indie studio famous for creating the Stronghold series.

Space Colony took the base management action to outer space, and now it landed on Steam, with new missions and features, and with Steam Workshop integration for the in-game map editor. The game is the HD edition of the game released back in 2012, with snazzier visuals, support for high-definition graphics and a wider field of view, enabling fans to experience it on modern machines.

The setup

You are in charge of a fledgling colony on the outskirts of civilization, tasked by a mega corporation to exploit the natural resources of various chunks of rock hurtling through space.

You have to survive, build and manage a base, and at the end of the day, turn a profit. You get a motley crew of space explorers, ranging from two Japanese teenagers to a Scandinavian biker and an 80-year-old guy who joined the mission in order to see space before dying.

The twist from regular city building sims is that you also have to take care of individual crew members and tend to their needs. Each of them has a distinct personality, training and preferences, they're not just faceless workbots, and you have to keep an eye on their status and allow them to nurture friendships and even closer relationships.

In addition to this, you also have to take care of the run-of-the-mill space colony stuff, including keeping oxygen and power levels within a certain threshold, in order for everything to run smoothly, and gradually expand your base, harvest resources, and turn them into goods in order to sell them on the marketplace for profit.

You can build a pretty big colony
You can build a pretty big colony

Gameplay - the base

Space Colony: Steam Edition includes a ton of single-player campaign missions, including various challenges and assignments, focusing on both peaceful building and the more aggressive, militaristic side of things.

In addition to this, you can also enjoy the community-created content, and there is also a sandbox mode where you can build to your heart's content and create the ultimate deep space tourist trap.

Pretty much every map begins the same way: your colonists disembark from their ship and take control of a very basic outpost, which you have to gradually expand in order to accommodate them and the mission objectives.

There are a ton of buildings and amenities that you can outfit your base with, in order to provide training and entertainment to your crew, as well as enough social interaction and options to satisfy the basic need for oxygen and food.

In addition to populating the living domes with sleeping facilities, studies, bars, disco rings and social interaction areas, you also have to find room for showers and a medical bay, in order to keep your colonists in tip-top shape.

You have to survey the planet and see what kind of resources are at hand, and then build the appropriate exploitation facilities and identify the most well-suited colonists to operate them in order to maximize your profits.

Some of the tasks can also be performed by androids, making things much easier, since you don't have to manage their needs, but they have a pretty limited life span, and you have to keep building them if you want your base not to fall apart, which is in itself a pretty difficult task.

Apart from growing space chickens and selling excess raw materials, you can also build various facilities designed to attract tourists, from hotels to casinos and space zoos, which will further fill your coffers with space bucks.

However, things are never as easy as they look, and you also have to take care of cleaning the base up, setting up automated defenses in order to deter predators and repel furry, disease-carrying critters, all of which take additional resources and manpower to manage.

One of the things that often gets in your way is the standardized size of the biodomes, coming in small, medium and large formats, which has no connection whatsoever to the things that are supposed to fit inside.

All the rooms are square, and you can't rotate objects of varying sizes, which limits your planning capabilities severely, especially since I expected stuff to be streamlined for use in space, instead of being so wasteful with space.

Expanding your base can end up being a very confusing affair, especially if during the campaign you happen to build the wrong things in the wrong place, and you end up lacking the necessary space to erect some new facilities.

The military aspect feels a little cumbersome, but fortunately the automated base defenses work pretty well as long as they're positioned right and you make sure there's enough power and fuel for them. Unfortunately, the unreliable and unpredictable nature of your colonists and supply flow can put a damper on your plans, and during some missions, you will find yourself overrun with alien critters without being able to put together and follow what should be a simple and straightforward plan.

Furthermore, the fixed isometric perspective can also hamper your efforts if you happen to place a rather large building "in front" of a smaller facility, resulting in the latter being rendered unselectable.

Living in space can be pretty hard
Living in space can be pretty hard

Gameplay - the colonists

The way the colonists work is pretty similar to the way things are done in The Sims. Each of them has a personality and some base stats that influence a certain set of needs, and you have to make sure that none of the bars sinks too low, otherwise you'll end up with a disgruntled colonist.

Every colonist also has a basic array of skills that can be expanded, and there is usually someone who is best-suited for any given job from the get-go. Depending on your objectives, you can train others in the skills needed to operate the base, in order to be more flexible about who does what, and not have a single crew member in charge of too many jobs.

Some of the colonists are smarter and therefore better suited to learning new things, so there is a pretty big chance that some particular characters will get stuck with the menial tasks, especially considering that each of them can only be assigned to two different jobs at any one time.

Juggling between the needs of the base and the competencies of the crew isn't overly difficult, but the fact that you don't have a proper management screen where you can directly assign people to jobs is pretty annoying. Instead, you have to keep an eye on what's going on and plug the holes as you spot them, which is not always the best way to go about these things.

In addition to this, you also have to keep an eye on the character overlay, where each crew member's portrait is highlighted in a color that conveys their mood. If you don't work toward solving their problems and nuisances, they can go berserk and start trashing the base, destroying equipment and installations and even fighting among themselves.

The fact that some skills aren't that easy to come by can mean that if one of your crucial crew members isn't tended to and has to be put in the brig or has several status bars reach a critical level all at once, you can be left with a hole in your carefully constructed management flow, and that can propagate and affect other areas as well.

You have to micromanage them a lot, especially if there are lots of them, and pay attention to what they like and dislike, and sometimes it can feel like a chore, especially when they're sitting around doing nothing instead of trying to fill up their need bars.

I personally disliked the fact that you feel like a babysitter most of the time, especially when you have to constantly keep your eyes on them, due to the lack of a menu that would allow you to come up with a certain routine for them.

In addition to this, there are times when you have to specifically click on socializing commands in order for the crew members to do something together, and you can't schedule them, and they won't occur spontaneously, like when two people happen to grab a meal at the same time.

Overall, the social side of things adds a welcome layer of added complexity to the usual base management and resource gathering activities, even though the interface could have been crafted a little better, and some of the features could have been a tad more automated, or at least better implemented.

Sound and visuals

The graphics show their age, but they don't look ugly, just dated. Everything works well on widescreen monitors and there is a lot of detail, as well as support for high resolutions.

The space funk soundtrack is pretty catchy, although it gets quite repetitive during longer play sessions, and the sound design is pretty spot-on, having the right amount of industrial noises, cabin pressurization effects whenever one of your crew members steps outside, and a ton of other useful auditory cues.

The crew will draw your attention to various problems that need solving, from individual needs to your base machinery breaking down, offering valuable insight and feedback, making the entire experience more immersive and believable.

There are also a ton of humorous snippets of dialogue that the characters utter, and the voice acting is also pretty good, making each of the colonists feel distinct.


The Good

  • A lot of content
  • Blends base and people management
  • Challenging
  • Replayable

The Bad

  • Lackluster visuals
  • Clunky interface
  • Tedious at times
  • Can't zoom
  • Not enough variety

Conclusion

Space Colony: Steam Edition is clearly reaching out from a time way back when video game design used to be more forgiving. It's got a lot of flaws, but it also has a ton of personality, and it offers a pretty solid space colony management experience, albeit one a little on the light side.

There aren't that many choices to make while playing the game, and there are numerous clunky systems, including the general way the interface is designed, but the game does show a ton of creativity and feels quite distinct from other city building strategy games out there.

The fact that it offers a fresh experience that blends proper city-building with managing the needs of your crew, in a manner similar to the one in Maxis' The Sims, as well as protecting your assets from alien intruders, offers Space Colony: Steam Edition a uniqueness that is its greatest asset.

It's old and it creaks, there are many times when I felt that certain features were simply missing, such as the ability to queue orders, but in the end, there's a lot of action under Space Colony's hood, even if it does get old relatively fast.

All-in-all, it's pretty challenging and still enjoyable, in spite of its shortcomings and lackluster visuals and interface, which is a veritable feat for a 12-year-old video game.

story 7
gameplay 7
concept 8
graphics 7
audio 8
multiplayer 0
final rating 7.5
Editor's review
good
 
NEXT REVIEW: Slow Down, Bull

Space Colony: Steam Edition screenshots (12 Images)

Space Colony: Steam Edition screenshotYou can build a pretty big colonyLiving in space can be pretty hardSpace Colony: Steam Edition screenshotSpace Colony: Steam Edition screenshot
+7more