The Colonists

Prelude metareview: this game was released early in its development cycle, and while now quite mature is still evolving. It’s a labour of love (I suspect) from its developer. So reviews written prior to 2020 - particularly those which refer to it as short, incomplete, or otherwise unpolished, are now quite outdated and inaccurate. This is a fantastic Settlers-like - the best I’ve played, including The Settlers games themselves. The art style is what it is - you might not be a fan, as I was not at first impression, but it actually grows on you and now I really like it. The soundtrack is very nicely done too. The game can feel very zen-like, if you want (i.e. if you don’t play military missions, which are optional in the campaign). It has a very comprehensive - daunting, at first, but quite incremental & learnable - set of resources & buildings. They’re very well balanced, and there’s plenty of depth for building complicated production networks and transport pipelines. There’s also a moderately deep tech upgrades system which helps your colony scale and helps guide your focus through each mission. It can be challenging at times, but always in a good way. Managing resources is the heart of the game, and the GUI is excellent for this, providing tremendous detail - if you want it - quite clearly. There’s an immense amount of customisation you can do, if you want to really micromanage, but by and large you don’t have to - it helps, but it’s mostly not required for completing the missions nor for simply enjoying the game. I experienced some unusual and severe bugs when I first started playing - specific to my hardware setup, I think - but the developer (one lone guy!) worked studiously with me to address them in short order - again, this game is steadily evolving, and there’s a new update with bug fixes - and sometimes neat new features! - almost every time I open Steam. It’s one of my favourite games of the last couple of years - well worth checking out.

For me it plays a lot like Settlers 2. The challenging part is keeping transportation of goods efficient. In contrast to Settlers 2, you can fine tune goods distribution. You can blacklist/whitelist goods from certain routes. You can even see the path that every goods crate took through your transport network. There are useful alerts about congestion and even graphs to look at! Combat is indirect, you won't command individual robots, but build watchtowers that fire at your opponent's watchtowers (if you supply them with ammunition). A map editor would be really cool and I am sure very welcome by the community. Since the relase the game has seem a constant stream of updates that include bugfixes and additional features like enhanced goods routing options and a sandbox mode. I hope they keep this up!

Very true to the source material. This was my first foray into The Settlers before I went back to play some of the original classics. Had lots of fun with the novelty - which isn't actually new at all but was new to me - of having limited road access for my settlement logistics. Graphics are cute, cubic robits and that's fine, though I prefer the Settlers 2 redux graphical designs myself. It's worth a play through in my opinion.

Really would like this game but have rage quit twice now and it's simply not worth the time. Ideas and mechanics are good but implementation is lacking. In particular, certain AI elements are just broken. For example, you can have resources demands from one building needing items from another just down the path but all the bots are sitting idle. Given that you are timed, wasting it trying it fix it is frustrating. Another example is storage areas which are simply implemented incorrectly. The developer just made them have a demand like other consumers but that is flat wrong. They are overflows storage that should immediately release their stores. But no, a storage area on one island, for example, will create demand from other buildings on other islands causing the bots to fill boats with items to fill it however remote. Argh!!

I do have this game, I just have it for steam. I love this game, and yes it still needs work, and it is being worked on, but that doesn't make this bad game. I love that there are a lot of little robots running around and helping you build your colony, I also love that there is a growing community on the discord. I and others alike are building maps, reporting bugs, and helping the one developer making this game, fix the problems with the game. So yes this game does need work but its off to something that will be great,