Space Station

There have been a number of space station sim games over the years, but in the past most have been firmly of the tycoon game style--that is, primarily about building modules and expanding your station, with some notional flow of dollars increasing if you do it well. SpaceStationSim takes a somewhat different approach; it's more of a hybrid of a life sim (the granddaddy there being The Sims) and a tycoon game. You create an astronaut, and the gameplay involves both building out your station and satisfying the needs of your crew. Which includes, naturally, things like making sure they have enough to eat and time for potty breaks--and also enough to breathe. Life on the final frontier isn't always easy.

On first booting Outpost Kaloki, I thought I had the wrong game. I had been told that it was a space station management game but the graphics looked like Cartoon Network versions of retro-science fiction adventures. The Saturday morning-style of animation and the real-time nature of the game play initially fooled me. The dollar amounts popping out of businesses and the animated spaceships made the game feel very different from the "SimCity in Space" that I was expecting. Even the funny voices and alien syllables when you deal with the space aliens are a delightful addition to the game.