Aven Colony
Platform: Steam
My Game Time: 12 Hours
Released: July 2017
Game Description:
Build a new home for humanity with Aven Colony. Discover Aven Prime - an alien planet of deserts, tundras, and jungles light years from earth. Aven Colony puts you in charge of humanity's first extrasolar settlement, where you build and expand your small colonies into massive, sprawling cities while dealing with the challenges faced when settling on a new world.Build your colony's infrastructure, look after the well-being of your citizens, manage your resources, and guide your colony to prosperity against the backdrop of the harsh and often dangerous realities of the exotic world of Aven Prime.
My Summary:
A slow paced and relaxing city builder based in a bright and colourful sci-fi universe. The game never truly hits 5th gear and suffers from a lack of late game options. Overall a good effort and something to try when you want to play away a few hours in a peaceful manner.
You know what I really love about this game? Well of course I am going to tell you; the atmosphere and the relaxing play style all wrapped up in a pleasant sci-fi setting. Its perfect for when you want to distress and focus on building a colony on a far away world. Now don't get me wrong this game is far from perfect and it lacks a lot of challenge and longevity but its perfect for shorts burst when you want something different. Pick this up on sale and enjoy it!
The core game play revolves around placing buildings and managing resources such as food, minerals, air quality, water and energy. The placement of buildings is very simple to achieve and is assisted with intuitive overlays to help you understand the resource output of the particular structure you want to place. This game makes things very easy to understand (in some cases almost a little to easy) and the user interface is very well planned out. Some of the menus can look a little dated but overall the game is very well presented and makes things easy to find and do. Building a large self sustaining colony is quite easy. After you are established a number of hazards present themselves as challenges to the player. Occasionally external threats such as lightning, winter, meteor storms and alien creatures (Worms and Spores) will attempt to ruin the bliss of your meticulously planned Aven colony. Most of the time these are quite simple to deal with if you have the correctly placed defensive structure to counter them.
The main campaign is about surviving and building colonies with different challenges and environments presenting themselves to the players as the game advances. The missions hand hold the player almost to the extent that you don't need to stray to far from them to succeed. However as the missions progressed I did find myself branching out from them and building my own structures or taking advantage of the resources that presented themselves. Once you beat a mission you move onto the next colony where the process begins again with slightly different parameters. The story line campaign tends to pop up just at the right time to prevent you from getting bored. I did find some of the dialogue interactions mildly entertaining during the campaign and this helped keep the game fresh. After a couple of hours of Aven Colony I am ready for something else, but for those few hours it does keep you entertained in its laid back way.
The amount of buildings at your disposal is actually quite impressive and each is represented well (lightning striking your lightning towers is quite memorable!). The game just ends up being a tad easy and the same rinse and repeat tactics tend to be the way forward. Some challenges do present themselves and the scoring of your colony does provide some replay value to those looking for a bit more challenge. The developers also added a number of challenge maps that can be attempted to keep things interesting. If you are patient and looking for a relaxed experience then there is much here to enjoy, just don't expect a lot of challenge along the way!
The game looks great and has an extremely colourful pallet ranging from detailed structures to the surrounding fauna and flora of the planet. I found that this made the game a joy to play and even helped me to overlook some of its flaws. The landscape is full of colour and my colony looks amazing zoomed in. I found myself often just panning around different angles to get the best view of my structures and take in the view of my thriving colony. The only issue here is the lack of people you see moving around, you can zoom in and select residents but overall the colony always looks rather sparsely populated. This does not detract from the excellent visuals over all and I did spend I lot of time rotating the camera around my new structures and taking screenshots. The weather effects in the game are also impressive and watching lightning strike my towers created a great atmosphere. The changing of the seasons plays a big part in the game play loop, as winter strikes your farms become less efficient. This creates at least some challenge to managing your colony.The music in the game is just beautiful sci-fi tones and themes that let the mind wander. With a good quality headset the music really does promote the experience as a whole. High production values trhoughout add to the immersion of the game.
The game runs reasonably well with everything maxed out but there was some frame rate drops I wouldn't of expected from a game released in 2017. The graphics while pretty do not seem terribly demanding so these frame rate drops seem a little unusual. Overall though the game performs well and I did not experience any crashes during my game time. So what are the issues with this game? Well longevity, the game is rather simple and repeats the same formula as you progress through maps. This allowed for a predictable game play loop that can get boring after a few hours of continuous play.
My Review Score: 71/100
A game with some very positive aspects which ultimately falls down slightly due to its repetition of certain tasks. A great game for short bursts when you want an easy to get into city builder with a great sci fi aesthetic. If you get this on sale it is well worth a buy. Certainly not quite in the same league as Surviving Mars but an enjoyable experience nonetheless. Pick it up today on sale and have a nice relaxing time building your Aven Colony!
I have decided to switch to scoring games out of 100 as it allows me some more flexibility in my approach. If you enjoyed this review please get behind it with your up votes which will enable me to produce more content. Please comment with any games you would like to see reviewed next!
Lrev