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A detailed review of Creatures Docking Station for those new users that don't have it.

I love Creatures Docking Station. It's probably the Creatures game that I've played the most. It's got a lot of quirks, good stuff, and bad stuff. I'll be dividing this into sections, starting right about now.

The Setting

An unmodified Docking Station world takes place on a spaceship called the Capillata. However, with the addition of some of the various metarooms, you can play a game taking place in C1, C2, a halloween-themed space dome, a prehistoric planet, an ocean, the list goes on and on.

Now, about the Capillata. She (Shee believe their spaceships to be female) once harbored the Lone Shee, but now appears to be floating around in space, abandoned. The Lone Shee grew the Capillata in a test tube, then moved her to the ocean, and then finally launched her out of an erupting volcano to get off Albia, which caused the events of Creatures 2 to take place. The Lone Shee created Capillata in an attempt to catch up with the rest of his race, who left without him (jerks) while he worked on the Warp.

The Gameplay

Now that the pointless Shee history lesson is over, it's time to talk about what you've been waiting for, which is the gameplay! Let's all admit it, unmodified Creatures games aren't nearly as fun to play as when you've got a bunch of crazy add-ons.

Docking Station is actually really boring to play without add-ons. The entire space of the Capillata is smaller than the Norn Terrarium from Creatures 3, there's only one breed, and there just generally isn't much to do unless you're a fan of controlling the cameras and making them pester your Norns all day. Oh, well. It's pretty much a free trial of Creatures 3.

Docking Station makes up for its boring base gameplay with all the awesome stuff you can put in it. Imagine a Grendel that heavily resembles a dragon. You can do that in this game with the right breeds. Now, imagine a Norn with the exact appearance of a Grendel! If you know how to make basic edits with the Genetics Kit, and you have a Grendel breed, that's very much possible. The game even has a function to speed it up, which is handy for Wolfling Runs.

You can even dock the game with Creatures 3, which... gives you C3 with a tiny sliver of additional ground. But if you have C3 installed, you can use its breeds in Docking Station! Yay! You can also have all those crazy, amazing C3-incompatible agents and the C3 map, all at the same time. If you've got C12DS and C2toDS, you can even have all four of the games' play areas mashed together into one if you're persistent enough with trying to inject C12DS while C2toDS is already in the world.

Docking Station has a much more stable engine than the previous two games, and won't crash when you try to do something like importing a Norn with sprites from a breed you don't have. It also runs more smoothly, and the Norns don't get One Hour Stupidity Syndrome. The problem with the C3/DS Norns is that they breed like rabbits and are hard to get attached to with their hard-wired instincts telling them how to survive.

Overall
On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this game a 9. While it isn't too fun to play without add-ons, when you do have them, the game is awesome. It's fun to mess with the Genetics Kit, and it won't throw errors in your face as much. For all the crap I gave it at the beginning of this review, I actually think it's awesome.