If you like the management genre, you'll definitely enjoy Startopia. You run several space stations, providing shelter and comfort for visiting aliens. Just like the other games of this type, you set up your stores and services, generate some energy, then purchase better facilities. You can hire and fire aliens at will, assign them different jobs, and generally run roughshod over your space hotel. Buying and selling goods forces you to consider carefully where you expend your energy - the traders can be cutthroat.

The Entertainment Deck is where you'll have the most fun. This is where most of the shops and residential quarters are set up. If you like, you can create a "gentlemen's club" love nest where weary space travelers can rest themselves and enjoy beautiful alien females shaking their space gazongas for their pleasure. You can build bars, recyclers, sick bays, prisons, research labs...if you've seen it on Star Trek, there's an equivalent in Startopia. Speaking of Star Trek...

Startopia has an artificial environment deck of its own, called a Bio-Deck. While it's not holographic in nature, you can sculpt it to your liking, setting temperatures, terrain and the like to create different alien environments. Different aliens will demand different areas in which they'll feel most comfortable - and if you don't listen to their requests, don't expect to stay in business for very long. There's combat to deal with as well, with rival hoteliers/administrators ready to at it with you in order to corner the market. You have your forces, open up the doors to the enemy quarters, and hope for the best. Combat, quite frankly, isn't much fun, but you can turn off the war between players and concentrate on building the perfect space hotel.

The graphics in Startopia are great. Great swaths of colour fill the screen, and the aliens are very well-rendered. You'll recognize your greys, but there are other aliens which will make you wonder how on earth Mucky Foot came up with the designs - they're that cool. The sound is well-done also, with excellent voice acting from your advisor. Think of the angel/devil from Black & White to get an idea of the help you'll receive. The game brings you through slowly, training you as you go through the missions. In fact, it's so easy to get caught up in the campaigning aspects of the missions as you go through, before you know it the game is over. Luckily, Mucky Foot has seen fit to provide a sandbox mode to play in to your heart's content, just running the facilities and looking after the residents. This has always been my favourite part of these kind of games, and Startopia doesn't disappoint here.

Startopia is an excellent effort from Mucky Foot. Humour - GOOD humour - is hard to get across in entertainment software, but Startopia succeeds in not only being a fun game, but a funny game. I ran my copy on a AMD 1.2 with a Geforce 3 in 1024 x 768, and it chugged very rarely. Unfortunately the anemic manual makes it more difficult than it should to play Startopia...but it's still enjoyable. In fact, I'm going to mess around in sandbox mode some more once I finish this review, and that's probably the best accolade I can give.