When we first received this title it struck us as little more than a Sims rip off in space, fortunately Space Colony has a little more depth than your standard cash in title. The installation of Space Colony was quick and to the point and needed around 850MB of hard drive space. Once the installation was complete, we were ready to start colonizing! Space Colony puts the gamer in the role of Venus Jones, a futuristic and sexy town... err.. space planner. There are over 24 different missions that will test the strategic ability of gamers. The missions are broad in scope, ranging from peace time operations through to military encounters.

By building space zoos, hotels and military bases, gamers must use their resources to purchase, build and meet the needs of their people. Some parts of this title were very reminiscent of Microsoft's Zoo Tycoon in the way that you needed to cater to tourism to generate finances. The key resources of Space Colony are electricity, oxygen, food and money, these simple yet essential components are what is required to successfully maintain your inhabitants happiness.

Although this title is pretty neat in the way that it some what humorously portrays a working space colony, we did find that almost all of the subject matter had been visited before in other titles from the building of factories and workers in Warcraft through to the city planning of Sim City, it's all bee done before. The saving grace of the game is that despite the nods to other esteemed titles, this game is solidly put together  in a way that does not make the player feel ripped off  in any way.

Graphically this game is packed with thorough detail, making it a joy to watch. Everything from the textures on floor, through to an alien slime has been factored into the game with sometimes hilarious results. Another positive to this title is that its system requirements are not excessive with a low end Pentium 800Mhz being able to do the job with a standard 3D accelerator, and we are not talking about the latest technology either.

Music enthusiasts rejoice as this title has the ability for you to load your own music into the soundtrack in MP3 format. Each inhabitant in Space Colony has their own personalized audio with hundreds of different catch phrases. The game features a wide variety of awesome sounding special effects from explosions to the bubbling of a hot tub.

Space Colony is one of those games that will unfortunately be passed up by many gamers because of the similarity to other gamers. For those gamers that can look beyond this, Space Colony offers a great futuristic building game with impressive graphics, interesting characters that contain something for everything.

- Tory Favro & Andrew B