I used to play this game a lot when I was much younger. You are given the opportunity to build a space station that orbits the earth in order to make money. You add components to the station that will grow crops, provide housing, and health logistics to the people who are aboard your station. In the beginning of the game you only have enough money to build a couple of components, but if you start off right you are able to amass quite an empire as the game goes on.
I used to play this game a lot when I was much younger. You are given the opportunity to build a space station that orbits the earth in order to make money. You add components to the station that will grow crops, provide housing, and health logistics to the people who are aboard your station. In the beginning of the game you only have enough money to build a couple of components, but if you start off right you are able to amass quite an empire as the game goes on. Like any game in this genre you have to do research in order to build station components that are of the latest technology and in tern those will make you more money.
The
interesting thing about this game is that you have to fit these modules together in a way that will plan for the future. They only have a certain way they fit together and so if you lock up a module in the center of the station, with no way to hook something else to it, you end up having to redo the whole thing in order to make the connection work properly.
At times this game frustrated me very much and like all strategy games, I would start over, time and time again, to try and get it right. Also, like most strategy games, when your operation got too big, it became very hard to keep track of everything that was going on. It is turn based, so you could try and cover all the good and the bad that was going on before to submitted your turn, but there were always things that you missed.
I could compare the research tree in this game to be comparable to many of the games that came long after it as far as how extensive it is. The amount of different modules you can have makes the game playable for a long time. Depending on how you situate yourself at the beginning of the game (both in where you want to research and how the station is set up) will determine how hard or easy the game will become as you progress.
In summary, the game, for its time, was very playable. It took up a lot of my time back in the early 80’s. The graphics are about par for the course for a game that’s this old, but the gameplay more than makes up for it. And how many of us are going back to download DOS games so that we can get really cool graphics. I give it a 7.5 out of 10.
