Aven Colony

The good: The game is beautiful. The bad: Trying to play it. This game has potential but it isn't quite polished enough. Once something goes wrong it's basically impossible to fix the issue and everyone will die. The AI needs work, you can't micro manage people to go to buildings that are required to fix the issue. You can SORT OF micro manage by turning off non-essential buildings, but you can't turn buildings off unless you have ample stored battery power for some reason. Even pausing the game or turning it to 1x speed doesn't afford you the opportunity to save yourself from whatever issue cropped up. You are also inundated with messages that pop up and interrupt the game play, as well as messages stacked on the right side of the screen. By the time you realize you have an issue, good luck figuring out exactly what the cause was. Power issues cause everything to stop; food production, water production, resource production. One message I haven’t seen yet though is that a mine is running out or did run out. I have a couple of times been caught with no resources coming in and no building materials to get another mine going. Every so many days there is a vote and if you get voted out due to low morale you lose. I have tried not building tunnels and only atriums, and plenty of VR buildings around, and morale still suffers immensely with a higher population. The automated action of harvesting resources and turning them into building materials is incredibly slow. If you speed the game up to a reasonable pace then you are dealing with disasters every 15 seconds. Every day buildings get damaged and need repaired, and the auto-repair option that is unlocked taxes you to turn it on, which may be harmful to your progress given how slow resource and building material accumulation is. The devs should look to something like starcraft for a good pace of resources to action. At 1x it is painfully slow. at 8x it is painfully eventful. Very tedious, just on normal difficulty.

This game speaks to the part of me that enjoyed the thematic City Builders of old, such as the Sierra historic titles. It sticks with a few basic mechanics and, for the most part, does them well. I'm giving it 4 stars, instead of five because although it doesn't fall into the trap of being overcomplicated or lacking direction, certain aspects feel a little underdeveloped. For example, I'd have liked to have seen localised resource management, so it matters more where you put your storage and production buildings. Regardless of whether I'm giving it 4 or 5 stars, if you enjoyed the old simple and relaxed City Builders then you're probably going to enjoy this game.

I enjoyed playing Aven Colony, but didn't keep it installed the way I have some other builders. There's a lot to love here — good variety, replayability, and plenty of effort put into onboarding new players to the game and to the genre. I would have liked to see more choice, though. Generally in builders, there is a focus on breadth or depth, where verticality represents options and complexity (SimCity, Skylines), and breadth represents choice and replayability (Civ, ANNO). Think also the difference between city builders and empire builders. With Aven Colony, the maps are small, there are not many structures, and variation is not very rewarding. There is a lot of fun playing through the campaign — which I almost never say — and playing through the maps. Unfortunately, once that's done, I didn't have a great feel for where to go. Overall, a good investment for someone new, someone not looking to fiddle much, or spend more than a hundred hours in a sim or builder game.

The Good, the Bad and the Awesome. Game rendering is awesome. A world made of mold yet beaustiful. Complex in fascinating ways and not the easiest to learn. Be prepared to make serious mistakes and having to start over. Even played on "Cakewalk" there were some surpirses. Twice I had to reboot the entire game, but no lags or stutters. To lift a saying from GOT remember "Winter is Comng" so plan for it. Like Sansa Stark, get those supplies in storage. I know nothing about video game music, but in general I hate it, so I played with the music off but the speech dialog is essential. Listen carefully to everything. It probably does not have enough slaughter for the players who like to chop, slash, and blow things up. However both defense and offense are important. Study the landscape (mold scape?) carefully. The bad is the save mechcanics. I found I had to repeatedly delete all my saves so that I could maintain a clear direction to where I was in any senario. THe awesome -- the story, plain and simple. Unable to put the mystery to one side . The urge to fnd out just WHAT is going on and the WHY. I played the game through three -3- times. NOw going for my fourth time through at an ever increasing difficulties. And I will be sorry when it ends. I adore sims games and city building. I have bought and played every one every published. Aven Colony is by far the best.

I liked how the game has a proper tutorial and how it's integrated into the game (they don't insist but ask you to practice in the holo sim before going down to the planet). This deserves a mention as many games do a bad job of tutorials. I also liked the graphics, and how easy the game was to install. And I like the keybinding - eg though they use WASD they've also preconfigured the arrow keys to do the same (old gamers like me have only used arrowed keys since the 1980s - that WASD nonsense only started in the late 1990s). The game looks polished, is nicely paced, ok music and not taxing. Anyway, sadly, things go immediately downhill from there. I find it totally silly (and simplistic) that though building units might be contiguous (such as your starter base with all it's units joined in a line), you still have to connect them via an external series of tunnels for them to operate! People can't just walk from one unit to the next (let alone from one end to the other)! No you have to build snaking tunnels and connections joining each and every one. Aven rationalises this as being because the tunnels also act as power conduits. Huh? Can't they even connect power between two buildings that are literally joined together? Nope. The only reason I can see for this is so you can click on the tunnels, zoom in and thus click on your settlers! In any rational game they would be safely walking between joined buildings and not taking wasteful and relatively risky exterior tunnels everywhere. Oh look there's Jim walking to the drone hub and mumbling about coffee.. Oh, really... This concept could've been done much better - eg click on a building and select a damn settler if you want to see their cartoony photo and have one say hello or moan about the power supply. Have some buildings with domes to see the little blighters walking around sometimes. The only exterior folk should be suited or in vehicles, not plodding literally everywhere in silly glass tunnels like mice.