Space Colony

Ed Dawson likens Space Colony to an interactive Red Dwarf -– a fusion of Starcraft and The Sims!

Nothing to do with Colonic Irrigation, Colony Wars is all about managing the lives and operations of Space Colonists. Sent onto hostile and treacherous rocks by the murderous and capitalistic ‘Space Corporation’, you must survive a series of mini-dramas similar in setting to the film Aliens. At the same time, you’ll have to deal with polar personality clashes akin to those in the space-bound TV series Red Dwarf -- as well as maintaining a fragile network of structures under constant attack. Space Colony’s strong links to these spearheads of pop culture is a fun thing.

Space Colony is a hectic experience. As Venus, the experienced Space-Babe Project Manager, you must run a primary resource business while also waging war on aliens -- rushing along a tightrope of expectations and threats, as well as managing people at a micro level á la The Sims. This kind of fusion is a new thing in gaming -- it’s weird to go from dealing with someone’s urgent need to take a shower at one moment, to placing heavy laser guns at the next.

Personality plays a large part in the dynamics of Space Colony. Each character in your crew of around eight has their own likes, dislikes and hierarchy of needs that must be maintained to ensure they do their jobs. Some of this mirrors a Sims-like system, with relationships balanced up as the sum of positive and negative experiences. This layer of cooperation and productivity is the foundation of all other actions in the game.

Relationships can be managed by viewing each character’s political status and heading off discontent by making them sit down and work out their differences. Yet, just like reality, when external factors force you to push people beyond their usual comfort zones, niceties like friendship and harmony go out the window. Relations rapidly break down under pressure. You can hear little audio outbursts from characters making their feelings known.

The structure of the living space is also your responsibility. You must build new modules and place them in the landscape similar to Starcraft, with consideration for recreational, military and resource effectiveness. Of course, you must balance the colony finances while you are doing this and expand operations as necessary. Occasionally you will receive extra personnel. While the added work they do is valuable, your job gets more complicated as they add potential for personality clashes and discontent. You’ll constantly be juggling staff roles to keep the base’s core stocks of power, oxygen, food and money afloat. An unexpected aspect of the game is the new-world psychology belief that when people are happy and have all their needs catered for, they will work harder. In fact this is modelled directly into the game, with happy people literally allocating more of their day’s clock time as work, in proportion to their happiness level.

So, landed with a whingeing and incompetent bag of bad-tempered turkeys, you are given steep time limits for resource collection and thrown into lethal battle with vicious creatures who live on top of extremely valuable mineral stocks or both. You do this pitted against a raft of interesting alien monsters -- around forty different kinds with multifarious behaviours and forms. You’ll never quite get to Siege Tanks though, as your entire world is usually contained within a short walking-distance. Besides which, you couldn’t possibly deal with many more of these unruly employees/soldiers at once. At least, not without some sort of ‘bitch-slap’ option. Of course, you have to do the right thing by counselling people, paying attention to them and making some attempt to solve their grievances.

Playing games like this will give you new respect for managers in every profession.

Space Colony has quite a short single-player campaign, however, you can create your own levels with an included editor, and download other people’s scenarios off the Internet.

Essentially, Space Colony is a fun and interesting title with extra appeal for those who enjoyed The Sims.