Utopia

Title		Utopia
Game Type	Management Sim
Players		1
Compatibility	Not AGA?
Submission	Andy Thomas (andy@adamantium.demon.co.uk)

Review
 This was an isometrically viewed space colony creation game.  The aim was
to defend yourself against increasingly hostile alien races while at the
same time trying to provide enough facilities for your citizenship to
increase their standard of living beyond a certain level, in other words,
to create a Utopia.
 Utopia can easily be seen as a forerunner to some of the more modern
games of this genre like Fragile Allegiance. There were hospitals to
build, hyrdoponic farms to feed the populace, gas and ore to be mined to
fuel your military efforts. I remember that the AI for your tanks could
often be quite annoying; you could set waypoints, but if they tried to
navigate in the city they often got confused.  Combat other than self
defence with the aliens occured by sending vehicles off the map to the
alien city, which was a bit of a cop out, but...
 There were random events like meteor hits (always annoying those) and
mine collapses.  You could spy on the alien races in order to learn more
about them, and your spies would report on progress with battles.  You
could even trade surplus production with Earth.
 All in all it was a quite an involved game, although there weren't the
variety of units to build that you see in more modern games.  If you've
played Imperium Galactica on the PC, then you have a fairly good idea of
how Utopia's colony fights and construction were handled.  I found that it
was just a bit too tough to beat; the final alien races were very, very
hard indeed and you didn't have enough time to get anywhere near enough
defences up, but other than that, it was an engrossing game.

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