Created by Firefly Studios, the developers of Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader, Space Colony follows the same basic simulation-type theme as their previous titles. Space Colony is a cross between Moon Tycoon, Startopia and The Sims. Space Colony takes place in the year 2153 - one hundred fifty years in the future where Earth is no longer economically viable. The galaxy has been split into two halves - the haves and the have-nots. The new way to make money is to set-up Lander operations, setting down on a new planet, killing off anything endangering the profits, sucking up every resource the planet has to offer and then moving on. The heroine of the story is Venus Jones, already a veteran of three mining assignments and looking forward to retiring. As you might expect, that's not going to happen anytime soon, since she'll have to build and manage a profitable series of space colonies for her boss, the evil Mr. Waterhouse.

Space Colony is made up of a campaign mode, a galaxy mode and a sandbox mode. The campaign mode contains 24 unique missions, all have different goals, ranging from building hotels and zoos to encourage tourism, to building a station in a hostile area and defending it against vicious aliens. You control a number of human workers, each with their own personalities (there are over 20 unique personalities), and assign them a number of tasks to accomplish tasks that will ultimately make the colony a successful venture. Colonists also can be trained in libraries or expensive training pods to acquire new skills. Of course, keeping colonists happy is a key to the game. Some of them need to eat, need to talk, need to sleep, and so on. If their needs aren't satisfied, they'll get angry and they're work shift will diminish. Remember, a happy colonist is a hard working colonist! In order to satisfy your colonists, you have a variety of resources at your disposal. You not only have to deal with the obvious problems of oxygen, power, and food but also with the threat of asteroids, volcanoes and earthquakes that affect many of the planets in the game. Weird and wonderful Trifid like vegetation will also trouble you as well as the aliens. There are over 100 buildings and subsystems to build, from in-the-base structures like bars, social areas to resource gathering installations like harvesters and miners, argon gas rigs, space chicken farms, and nutrient extractors.

Galaxy mode features twenty-four extra missions within sixteen mini campaigns, split between three categories: Economic, Military and People. You can play these in any order and they offer up a number of different challenges to accomplish. The missions range from easy to extremely hard, where you may have to harvest food or take down the local hostile inhabitants. Finally, the Sandbox mode allows you free reign to build the ultimate space colony of your own creation. There is even a level editor where you can build your own planets compete with unique challenges and resources.

Well, this isn't the sort of game you buy to show off your new $400 video card. Surprisingly, there are no zooming or rotating options to help you find important items. Still, it wasn’t a big deal. If you like this genre, the gameplay is fun and will keep you very busy for long days. There is nothing new, but in its familiarity lies some of its strength, in that you immediately know how to play. You can try this playable demo (122MB).

Minimum system requirements: 800MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 4MB graphics card and 850MB free hard disk space