It's tough, reimplementing a game that will be compared to the original. As a lover of the original, I really tried to enjoy this. I tried to treat it as a new game. But unfortunately it failed to deliver, and halfway through the missions I installed the original StarTopia and played that instead.

A major problem was that I couldn't finish a mission in one sitting without some serious memory leak making the game unplayable. Over a half hour it would slow down massively and the UI would bug out, failing to register clicks in the right place. I don't want to relaunch the game 3 times to finish one level.

The comedy is a big miss for me. Instead of a helpful but judgemental companion, you get charmless and annoying robot who just insults you all the time.

They did try a few changes that I think were well intentioned, and a few QoL features, like the biodeck harvesting itself. They mostly dropped the money=power system. But the trading and cargo bays don't work together and slow things down, the crafting and mech systems are a slog, and some easy UI features that improve hiring and promoting staff are missing. The blueprints system doesn't save across games, making it pretty useless, and the merging of sleep, food and cleaning systems felt unnecessary. Either drop it all and just have one system, or keep the separate buildings. The rooms all feel clunky, and it's much harder to customise with small decorations due to the large equipment.

Combat was probably the worst part of the old game, so trying to replace it with a new system was in theory a good move. But the new system is buggy and hard to control, and mostly comes down to just lining up all your mechs (assuming they can navigate correctly) and letting them duke it out. There might be a little more to get out of it, but with the play issues it was pretty basic.

Ultimately, it felt like it was trying to be StarTopia without the love or understanding of what was (and wasn't) fun about it. It fails as a remake, and it's not really good enough to succeed as its own game, so I'd say stay away!