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- Mothership Entertainment
- Mothership Entertainment
- Mothership Entertainment
- Mothership Entertainment
Aven Colony
Released On: Jul 25, 2017
65
7.5
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 21 Critic Reviews
65
24% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
71% Mixed
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 21 Critic Reviews
65
24% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
71% Mixed
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Beautiful, long-lasting and pleasantly made, this is Aven Colony – the star among the building strategies. Although it copies many things from less known games, it managed to keep its own and dignified face.
Aven Colony suffers from a mild identity crisis. It converges many base building sims in one, never collapsing under that weight but never excelling either. All in all, it's a pretty decent and stable colony sim and even manages to offer some moments of otherworldly poetry.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 42 User Ratings
7.5
67% Positive
28 Ratings
28 Ratings
14% Mixed
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
19% Negative
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 42 User Ratings
7.5
67% Positive
28 Ratings
28 Ratings
14% Mixed
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
19% Negative
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
I'm quite a fan of this kind of game, so I let myself be tempted, and I don't regret
not easy to quickly understand the mechanics but also after that it brings a lot of challenges the campaign is really well encrypted and the difficulty is progressive according to the progress of the story
the graphics are really pretty for an unpretentious game,
the soundtrack guilds us throughout the campaigns
I really had a good time playing this game
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PC
Aven Colony; is very much as advertised. Pretty much checks every box for what you would expect from a resource management city building game on an alien planet. Recent updates have upped the challenge in a very positive direction. Keeps you on your toes and encourages a proactive approach to keeping your colony going in an environment that can be as much your friend as an enemy.
A genuine pleasure -- the attention to detail in the art assets themselves is particularly impressive.
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PC
Aven Colony isn’t a bad game. It was just sort of meh for me. Luckily, the developer is staying involved with the game. They’ve already released multiple patches even though the game has only been out for a week, and they’ve promised to add new content eventually — and for free — so maybe things will get better over time. But for now, Aven Colony isn’t really a game I’d recommend. It’s only for you if you really like city-builders and you’re not too choosy, or if you haven’t played many city-builders before.
Boring sandbox mode is partly compensated by the campaign: in each mission developers came up with new ways to complicate the life of the colonists, while at the same time unraveling a story about the imminent end of the world and the search for alien artifacts. [Issue#223, p.60]
Aven Colony is a standard game in this genre. It does not bring anything new and has some issues, but its multiple choices make it a good title for the city-building genre fans.
A good city builder provides a constant balancing act between keeping your people fed, happy and healthy. That should be doubly so for a city builder set on an alien planet with countless unknown dangers lurking in every corner. Aven Colony does little to deliver the struggle of a space colony, or any colony really, and that is a missed opportunity if I ever saw one. Even if you’re not looking for that experience, there is little to recommend it as a regular city builder - it’s just too easy.
I spent the equivalent of a working week playing Aven Colony and it was hard labor. This is a game of relentless concentration and chore-work, with only the briefest flashes of magic and relief, offering almost nothing new to the city building, or resource management genres.
There has been some significant free changes and updates that have drastically changed this game from being monotonous to challenging. If you enjoy strategy city building games that have a lot of resources and micro management you will like this game. Aven Colony is much more satisfying as a city building resource management game than let's say something like Annon 2070. Most of what i expect from a game that requires you to build a colony on a foreign planet happens in Aven Colony.
Sometimes it is crisis after crisis and that can be annoying and if you're not carefully balancing resources and buildings you can get voted out quickly. I enjoy that challenge because it means I have to keep managing things. That could be boring to some people but to me I love it.
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PC
This is a science fiction city building game with a relaxed pace. It's birds-eye view, and mostly involves placing and configuring buildings in a city. You spend some time in a zoomed out view outside your colony exploring with expedition ships and placing additional satellite colonies. There is an evolving story in the Campaign mode.
THE GOOD:
- Overall, the game is an easy, fun, relaxing experience. There is only one really tense and difficult mission where you have a time limit.
- The evolving story for the Campaign mode is mildly interesting, although the ending is a bit cheesy and not particularly profound.
- Good tutorial design eases you into the game in a fun way. While it's not perfect, I had a few stumbling points and not everything was 100% clear, it was clear enough that I didn't have to look up anything online.
- There are no giant domes! A win for science realism.
THE BAD:
- The tutorial missions are maybe *too* long, and I started getting bored by the middle of the game. Fortunately, the later missions started getting more challenging with less hand-holding. I enjoyed the later missions quite a lot. So it was worth hanging in there and continuing.
- Referendums are very annoying. They are almost trivially easy to pass as I don't think my city *ever* had an approval rating of below 50%. Even with no effort you should stay above 60%. In spite of this, you get constantly harassed by pop-up messages over and over. I would have preferred if they notified me *once* and then just displayed an indicator thumbnail with the remaining time in the referendum and my approval rating.
- Artifacts are a poorly done addition to the game. You must place them before you know what they do and you can't move them afterward even though the placement might make them useless. In any case, none of them actually do anything useful because the game is quite easy.
- The outer colony exploration mode is really annoying. It leads to a ton of notifications and requires a lot of micromanagement that distracts you from the main game. There should be some kind of "attack move" you can use to have your ships automatically go to points of interest as they explore around.
- I wish you could manage notifications and decide whether they interrupt you, appear as thumbnails, or don't appear at all. As your colony gets larger dealing with notifications becomes a real drag.
- The colony is hermetically sealed... And yet when a geothermal fissure leaks poison gas outside the colony it somehow reduces the air quality *inside* the colony. How is that supposed to make sense?
- I'm supposed to believe that we need FIVE people to run a *water pump* in a sci-fi setting where cancer has been defeated and we can colonize other worlds. Water pumps were automated devices in the 1900s.
- The ideas on commuting are a bit weird in this game. People hate walking even short distances. Most strangely, people just hate to walk through a building to get to another building. I live in Montreal, where we have something called the Underground City where all you do is walk through buildings to get to other buildings and people love that here! It's a tourist attraction.
- When using a Mill, the "Share for All Mills" button is not intuitive. It's not clear that you should click the checkbox on the template mill first and then for any other mills you want to use that template.
THE UGLY:
- I encountered a game-breaking bug in the final mission that prevented me from winning the game. This was very disappointing. You have a task to find and use 4 artifacts, and for no reason I understand the game started the objective 25% complete. It might be because a defender bot attacked my colony directly, but it didn't leave me an artifact. So after I found only 3 artifacts the game moved on to the next objective--but I was now stuck! I was able to watch the ending on YouTube, but that's not good enough, and so I give the game a failing grade of 4 when I would have otherwise given it an 8.
- There was a mention of a "zorium bomb" in the last mission. I auto-completed the mission and it didn't end up installing on my expedition ships.
- Buildings "ghost", becoming semi-transparent, when you place a new building. This is insane as it makes it really difficult to place new buildings. There is a game setting to remove this effect, but it *doesn't even work*.
- The indicators for your change in food or water over time are typically wrong and not very helpful.
- I once saw a construction drone takes off east forever in a straight line, eventually plowing into a mountain and disappearing. It was pretty funny. I had to re-load for it to reappear and start working again.
- I've encountered several times a bug where deconstructing a passage tube fails. A drone sits there forever looking like it's deconstructing but doing nothing. Saving and reloading doesn't even fix this.
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PC
Could have been good but like so so many city builders its strategic shortcomings really hinder game play. Perhaps the biggest general criticism is weird resource management and trade policies that confound efforts to extend trade when finite extract-able resources start to run out. On the subject of which who would set up a colony on a planet with so few extract able resources to start with?
The results irritating game play that literally stops you from going any further unless you follow its linear, inflexible strategy parameters.
For me the older Civ games and Kingdoms and Castles really are the best of the bunch.
4/10.
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PC
This is the worst programmed game I have ever played. At one point in mission 3 or so I ran out of power, and had no option to shut down any buildings to conserve power so that I could build more power generation, and the city was just in decay and unrecoverable. There is no option to restart the mission, autosave is past the point of no return, and if I start that campaign level from the main menu, it forces me to select a perk, which I don't have when playing through the first time. So I have to load a manual save from a previous level and keep playing from there, or if you don't have one, I guess you would have to start over in the tutorial and play through again.
Unless they add more buildings to the already decent amount you start with, it looks like it will just be the same thing over and over on different planets, with little variety. A decent amount of hours for a single playthrough perhaps, but probably not something you will play a lot long term.
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PC
Summary Aven Colony puts you in charge of humanity's first extrasolar settlement on Aven Prime, an alien planet of deserts, tundras, and jungles light years from earth. Build the infrastructure, look after the well-being of your citizens, manage your resources, and guide your colony to prosperity -- all while dealing with the harsh and often dan...
Platforms:
- PC
- Xbox One
- PlayStation 4
Initial Release Date: Jul 25, 2017
Developer:
- Mothership Entertainment
Publisher: Mothership Entertainment
Genres:
