Aven Colony

This game at first looks really good: nice graphics, interesting setting and a lot of things to understand. Big amount of building with uprgrades and really cool mechaincs with drone-thing. But after a tutorial and a short mission you will understand that there's nothing to do. Game seems pointless and empty after an one hour. Such disappointment.

A decent city builder slash colony management sim. Definitely worth the <$5 I spent on it on sale, probably worth it at full price if it's in your budget. Solid 4/5 Yams

It's pretty well made and balanced. I wanted to reassign the space bar to pause. The interface has an odd quirk or two. Butm the tech tree and balance is solid. Plot juist seemed to randomly kick in after more than 2 hours. So far I like it. Well woth a buy on sale!

Build a colony, research technology, explore, build defenses, expeditions and settlements to trade with, funny and intriguing campaign story. Every map has its own pros and cons and stimulates to change focus and priorities, balance growth, happyness, currency, housing, employment, air, food and water etc. Replayability with perks, speed runs, achievements, challenges and above all it's good for a casual player like me. The only cons: the exploration of the outside world and the events are a bit repetitive and it would be nice to put a cap on manufacturing in mills/chem labs, to have a menu for managing/finding buildings and prioritize some alerts over others (hundreds of them).

It is overall a good city builder and explained the concepts pretty well to me for someone who hasn't played such a game in many months. It has a small set of gameplay elements (food, water, morale, and some disaster types). I experienced no technical flaws (no crashing or other game-breakers) through my entire playthrough, even though I'm picking up the game many years after its release with Windows 11 24H2 which didn't exist when the devs made the game. The overworld map UI has a bad layout with elements obscured by the notifications, but it functions. One problem I had is that there is a very limited amount of solutions to each problem. You'll notice at the higher difficulties that your colony layouts will end up the same. For example for two of the disaster types (that happen very often), you either have a specific building, or you lose that playthough. Anyone who likes a massive amount of building varieties will be disappointed here. Nice experience overall.