I'll be focusing on gameplay. The graphics you can judge by the screenshots. There is a story, but it's fairly predictable as far as I've gotten in the campaign. The Good: You can directly control the growth of your population. The idea is that new people come via shuttles form a colony ship in orbit around the planet. So if you want faster growth you can build more buildings that accept the incoming shuttles and if you've overstretched you can deactivate said buildings. Getting the information for managing your colony is fairly well done. There are various overlays for the map and various statistics can also be viewed. After one instance of a building has been upgraded you can directly build the upgraded version. The Bad: I think a good game presents a problem and multiple solutions to it. For some things Aven Colony does this, but for others it does the opposite: Some alien creatures are coming to destroy your buildings or big chunks of ice are falling from the sky or alien drones attack your colony? Build Plasma turrets. The Chemical plant, Mill and Bar & grill are also pulling double or triple duty. The overworld is a lot shallower than at first it seems, including settlements. A lot of the game is spent waiting for nanites, the building material, and you can't really speed it up. They can be created from mined metal ores or a processed plant that can be grown on farms. Mines run out and even before, they can only supply one Nanite processor. Or you can use a quicker mine that wastes the ore and you run out even faster. The processed plant option doesn't run out, but is a lot slower and requires a lot more workers so until you build up your colony you're stuck waiting. There are also some technical and design issues. About 1 in 10 startups the game crashed. Can't select an overworld POI if the exploration vessel is too close to it. If a building doesn't get a raw material for a while, then production won't resume even if the material becomes available again.
TL; DR: Most elements are taken from other games and the few new ones are shallow or dumb. Also a lot of padding. On foot combat is taken from the Arkham series of games. Later on to raise the difficulty, the number of enemies increases, but since you don't really have ways of fighting bigger groups at the same time, the fights get tedious. The map has some interesting ideas, but everything stays shallow and a wasteland gets boring after a while. Vehicle combat is the highlight, but that is also nothing we haven't seen before and gets repetitive after a while. There are also some bad design choices. While on foot in tight spaces and sometimes while driving, fighting the camera is a bigger challenge than fighting the actual enemies. The main goal of the game is to upgrade your new car, because Max's old one gets taken again. First I thought this could be interesting, I wonder where they will go with this? Well, turns out nowhere. You go around helping cardboard cutout NPCs to unlock new parts for your car. The way you help also doesn't change from the start, so it's just endless chores. Max's madness is somewhat touched on connected to character progression, which was a neat idea, but that goes nowhere and even stops being a topic after you reach the highest character rank, which is like halfway into the game. There is also a friendly dog that helps you clear minefields. How this works is you drive around with a specific car with the dog on the back. When a minefield is in the area, the dog starts to bark and point in the direction of the mines. Incredible nose on that dog by the way, smelling a buried mine from a moving car and from several hundred meters. As you get closer, the barking changes until you get very close to a mine and it is marked and you can deactivate it. While the barking is still ongoing. So they've managed to include a dog into gameplay that is both stupid and annoying. Oh, and this must be done for some of the car part unlocks.
