New game:
http://af.gog.com/en/gamecard/space_colony_hd?as=1649904300
Is it any good? I noticed it was made by the same company that made Stronghold. Sure looks pretty.
Space Colony has style (which a lot of games are lacking in these days) and a lot of it. But the gameplay is a little shallow. It is one of Firefly Studio's early games, back when they were still trying.
There's a decent number of build options for a base, when you look at it all on the surface. But most of the options are recreational facilities, and the rec facilities you need for a mission are determined by the colonists assigned to the mission, since each colonist likes only certain recs. So, each mission, most of the rec buildings go unused, leaving you with not much you have to do to build your base.
Each colonist has their own personality, skills, quirks, and work ethic, which is a nice touch, and you spend a good bit of time managing those things. Makes it more like a real workplace with psychopathic corporate overlords. But managing them doesn't take a lot of effort, since, even if two colonists absolutely hate each other, a few sessions on the talking couch will have them becoming friends.
The core thing you have to do for a base is maintain Oxygen and Power levels, since you're space workers working in a hostile atmosphere, and the colonists will ignore their jobs if they're busy fighting/moping/complaining about not getting paid, and will thus let those things fail. Which is a kick, but also not particularly complex to take care of.
And then, when you've taken care of that, you set about harvesting whatever resource the corporation tells you to harvest, which usually amounts to plunking down a single harvesting building type, and then waiting for the colonists to gather enough of the resource in question. Missions do get more complex than that, towards the end, and some missions can be challenging, particularly in the combat path, but the challenge doesn't lie in their depth.
Great stye, low substance. All in all, then, it's a lot like a base-building version of Stronghold, with the relative importance and level of detail of the fighting side and the managing-the-base side flipped.
