Aven Colony is a decent game: the graphics are pretty, the gameplay is balanced, and overall it's enjoyable. It has good bases, but infortunately never go further. First, if you are a citybuilder veteran, you'll find Aven laughably easy. Fulfilling your citizen needs is very straightforward, there isn't that much to do. Water, food, health, entertainment and that's all. In most games of this genre, you'd need to provide more and more different services and goods to attract better classes of citizens who'd in turn either staff advanced building and/or provide money through taxes, but not here. That could be ok, not every sim game has to be complex. It could be just a nice chill and casual game. If it wasn't for the second negative point: a glaring lack of content. The main campaign has 12 missions, and since the first two are tutorial, that makes actually 10. Granted, the last 2-3 are rather long to complete (and again, you'll need patience rather than skills) but that's still ridiculously short: the old Impression games (Caesar, Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor) have each 30+ missions. As of 2020, but game is still sold for 32€ full price: it's awfully pricey for what you get. It came three years ago already, and the only additional content it ever received was a sandbox map (Cerulean Vale) shortly after release. I'm not sure the studio (Mothership Entertainement) still exists. So forget about any DLC or extension. tl;dr: Aven is a decent game, but neither challenging or long. And once done, you won't feel like coming back to it. Get it on a -50% sale.
Augustus said once: "I found Rome a city of bricks, and I left it a city of marble". Pharaoh found it a city of marble, and turned it into a city of diamond... I still have the original CD somewhere, but bought it again at bargain price to have the Cleopatra add-on I never had back in the day. Pharaoh is the successor of Caesar III, and to me the best of the series, even compared to the games who came after (like Zeus) It took everything that was grand about C3 and made it even better. It is a game easy to pick up (if you never played a city builder before) and really challenging to finish, promising countless hours of play, either in story mode or sandbox. Now go build your own bronze age megalopolis and may Osiris be with you (and help you keep your granaries full)
Invisible Inc. is the kind of game that looks fantastic for the first two hours of play, and become more and more unsatisfying as you go through because the flaws become apparent. The foundations are solid though: it's a well-made tactical turn-based game, there is not much to complain about the mechanics or the AI. It has stylish graphics and animation who remind me of some 90s/early 2000s animated series, a cool cyberpunk setting, and an overall good story. First thing that bugged me, as many people pointed out: it's repetitive. Go from A to B, do action C, and evacuate. I'd say it is mainly due to the fact the layout of each level is procedurally generated. That feature, meant to make each playthrough unique, ends up with the opposite effect: everything looks the same, because there is only one set of corporate office/lab elements of environment. Worse, the architecture sometime makes no sense: with the super server room generated next to the janitor's cabinet. I would have definitely preferred a fixed level layout, but with more elaborate objectives and many ways to complete them. The agents lack personality: the game developers boast on the voice acting, but couldn't spare some to write banters between agents and makes them feel like real characters. I desperately scrounge for money, but my black market contact only offer me stuff I can't afford. My team is inserted via teleporter (!) yet need to reach an elevator (?) to escape. It a sum of little things that makes me not really want to start another game after I reached the end. Too bad because again, it has really good core mechanics. I'll definitely look out for a sequel that may improve on this base.
