Space Station Tycoon - first hands-on

Power plants make power, everything else uses power and money but makes you more money - but only if it's something your patrons actually care about. The different ships zipping around all contain passengers eager to tell you what they want now and what they're going to want soon. Your goal then becomes finding a way to give the people as much of the stuff they want as quickly and consistently as you can without going bankrupt.

Simple to say, tough to do at times. Especially when one considers the added criteria or concerns that add variety. You'll need to make X amount of money in Y minutes, you're parked near a supernova so you'll need to spend extra cash on added maintenance workers, you've been swallowed by a space whale so you can't expand as much as you'd like - that sort of thing.

One big change from the 360 forerunner is in the size and shape of the stations themselves. Each one has only one level of "spokes", but you can build multiple floating islands and link them, making a much larger station overall (unless you're stuck in the whale, like we mentioned, or in a cave). Perhaps then you can rely upon the decorations you unlock and place on the circular "hub" of each island to enhance the effectiveness of that island's structures. Basically, space palm trees won't help chemistry research, but they could improve the experience on a station with a focus on fun.

The Wii controls are of course new, and work well - especially when using the Gravity Well to drag a lost customer to a specific location, or the Gravity Blast to knock them away from somewhere they shouldn't be. Space Station Tycoon isn't going to work out for the "gibs and explosions" crowd, but when you feel constructive rather than destructive, these 40+ levels should help the light-hearted, cosmic city planner in you get its groove on.