Aven Colony (2017)

I'm a huge fan of city builder games. I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to this one, except that maybe I knew it would be a major time-sink for a few days, and it was, but no more than any other game. And I don't know why so many of the reviews are so negative; I thought it was a great game! Not flawless, but extremely fun, and quite well made. The story was interesting, the voice acting was good, the environments and individual building designs are GORGEOUS, and the resource management is pretty quality. I like it when I can place a single building or change a building's settings or distribute a new substance and see the colonist happiness tick up by one percent.

Where it's lacking a little is in the actual map and buildings. I wanted the map to have a visual boundary for where the buildable area was, and some sort of indicator (even a subtle one) to show me other buildings like the ones I'm trying to place. I was constantly losing specific buildings - mostly mills/chemical plants, and dispensaries, with no way to know how many I already had or where they were so I could change what they were doing. There may have been an overlay mode that I didn't find that would show me that, but I don't think there was. I would also have appreciated a mass select mode, primarily for recycling. It would have been much easier to get my colony organized and looking how I wanted if I didn't have to recycle each section of tunnel and each building individually just to clear an area.

I also didn't do much with the up-close views where your colonists talk to you, after the first intro mission where they show you how to do that, sadly. I forgot, mostly, and I'm not sure it would have aided me in any way.

Not sure why the average completion time is so long; I finished the campaign in about 15 hours, and I cleared all the in-game achievements in just under 24 hours. But anyway, solid game with a few flaws!

It's nothing great but I enjoyed this. It's a very bare-bones city sim that is basically a smart-pause RTS (minus the combat). It reminded me of the ol' classic Utopia from Gremlin Graphics, minus the cabinet advisors and spying grants. There are a few issues with it though:

First, you dont have money you have nanites which you produce mining ore. Ore is obtained from 'mine' tiles. most maps have anywhere from 5-15 (i think difficulty level affects this) and they will run dry at some point. This essentially gives the game a hard clock and limits how big you can build the colony...

Second, this game doesnt really have combat, it has defense structures which will blast incoming threats before they wreck buildings in kamikaze type attacks (very much like Utopia) IT does feature an expedition mode where you can send out ships to scour the planet for random encounters which have various rewards (mostly resources) however this simultaneously occurring game-play mode feels almost like a completely unnecessary minigame. Didn't really like it.

Third, part of that expedition mode minigame is that of starting additional satellite colonies which offer various perks. However its very expensive and time consuming to get this going and by the time you are there you should have probably be ready to win the scenario. Certainly felt like diminishing return.

Fourth, the trading in this game sucks. You have scripted scenario trade objectives for each mission in the campaign, otherwise you have the ability to swap your money for food, or luxury goods. and remember what i said about your money in this game???? Since you get a reward for completing the objective, sometimes it's worth checking out, however.

Some things I really liked were the way the game is a RTS with smart pause, as it plays very nicely and you have good sense of command of whats going on. the UI is also really good. Nothing feels really complicated or confusing. I also feel that I have a solid feel for my colony and how everything works and what I should fix my attention on (as opposed to pretty much any much more complicated sim game like Civ or Cities Skylines... oh god)

I also really liked the buildings in this game and the way they all come together. This is probably the highlight of the game in the way you have these various futuristic structures with different functions that you simultaneously learn about as you look at them operate time to time (somewhat visually interesting)

Had they improved the story a bit/voice acting (the unfolding voiceovers reminded me a lot of UFO: Afterlight, but was completely unnecessary for what the game had, like the just bolted it on) and maybe went in a direction more like Utopia did with different alien races, maybe even a more interesting research/tech tree (so much of it is window dressing) that lets you do something inventive or imaginative that ties into the story (like tiberium from Command & Conquer) and this game could have been more interesting to the point of being above average. It's bland lore and pretty repetitive gameplay with music tracks that sometimes will just come to an abrupt end before switching to another track. I managed to grind my way through most of the game but decided to move onto something else a few missions from the end. (cause its just going to be more of the same, mostly... very much in the way Utopia was as well!)

In the end, I enjoyed this simply because it resembles the way Utopia plays. you can take out the spy reports and advisory cabinet and It feels like maybe as much as 70% of the game. Even in spite of it's flaws I would recommend playing it if you like the idea of sim games that look like this but tend to find them daunting to learn or way too complex. I actually think this game has some sliding scale thing going under the hood where it does things in your favor if you're up against a hill or makes things harder if you are doing too well, but you can (and will) break your colony if you run out of power and that results in your food supply production halting... unhappy citizens wont work well and you simply wont be able to get things back online.

I love it when a game does something I haven't seen before, takes me somewhere new. Quick example: when it comes to a series like The Elder Scrolls, I'm always going to consider Morrowind the best of the bunch simply because the setting was weird and crazy and utterly alien. Give me somnambulist tumor cults and immortal mushroom wizards any day over dragons and castles and orcs and such. I love me that new new flavor.

Anyway, Aven Colony happened to find its way into my Steam collection some time ago, and after letting it sit a while, I decided to give it a try. And those first few hours? Pretty solid! The setting is interesting enough: you direct a colonization mission from Earth as it attempts to settle Aven, a green and verdant world with an atmosphere that supports plant life but lacks oxygen, so humanity will have to putz around in little hamster tubes for the time being. Sounds fun. Build a sprawling complex of tunnels and structures to keep your little vegan space cadets safe and cheery while the planet spits out hostile alien flora at you.

There's a sandbox mode, a campaign mode, and an array of challenge maps. Campaign mode is the one that offers the tutorial, so it's strongly suggested one starts there. And after 36 hours of slooooowly crawling my way through these campaign mode missions (god, has it really been that long??), I can safely say I have had my fill of Aven Colony.

As a colony management sim, it's painfully basic, though they make some effort to mask this. You can grow a variety of crops, some earthling, some alien. The earthling ones are purely for nomming, while the alien ones are needed to process mind-altering drugs and industrial paste. Each map offers varying support for different crops, so you get a lil' variety there. Beyond food, you need to keep your colonists hydrated. Build water buildings to provide that. Housing is also a concern; build more houses than you need so people don't feel packed like sardines. Power needs are met by electricity-producing buildings, and the (very rare) attacks by alien spores and ships and what have you are chased off building defense turrets. Connect it all together with tubes, and... well, that's it. Food, water, housing power, safety. Oh, and mines for more building material. Those are all your colonists need, and you can handle it by building a few greenhouses to pump out casaba melons and a water pump or two, decorated with a couple plasma turrets on the boundaries. Add an immigration center so new colonists can arrive, and you're golden.

You can build other stuff, of course. There are things like bistros and hospitals, parks and custom tubes with fancy gardens inside. There's the whole drug production system that lets you spit out mind-altering substances, scrubbers and hospitals take care of alien invasions if you fail to just shoot everything on sight, trade outposts let you make largely undesirable trades with other entities, and there's a whole expedition system where you crew a big ol' fighter ship and send it around looking for trouble to thwart. But it's all paper thin. You can get even the most effed up colony to a stable point within minutes of starting a new game. After that, you're just raising numbers that don't really do anything, adding new structures that serve no real purpose. This would be fine if the game offered flavor text in its place, a compelling story to hear out or an interesting alien world to explore, but the laziness on this front is amazing. At no point do you get to learn about the world around you. I kept waiting for a Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri style payoff, but it just never lands.

And the weirdest part is that they had some kind of a competent writer on-staff. The campaign mode does come with a plotline to it; as you complete missions, you hear from other directors of the project as they investigate ruins on the planet, explain the history of the race that lived here before, that sort of thing. And the writing is good. It feels more natural than a lot of voice acting I've heard from much bigger studios. Someone cared about the narrative here. It's just a shame that whoever that person was wasn't allowed anywhere near the text provided during expeditions, or had a chance to add some snippets of trivia to the native plants you grow.

Aven Colony isn't terrible. If the narrative catches your attention, and the special campaign mission goals that pop up every now and then feel interesting, you might find yourself playing and enjoying for quite a while. But at some point, you're going to realize just how samey all of this is starting to feel, how every colony follows an identical pattern and how every danger and challenge is entirely artificial and easily managed. And at that point, you're going to ask yourself why they took a 30-minute visual novel and attached a half-baked prototype of a colony management sim to it. It's promising enough that I honestly look forward to seeing Team Mothership do something else, but I hope they put the needed polish into it.

Intro

Aven Colony is a city-building game with a minor survival aspect. You start out with a small colony which you expand while keeping up with its needs (food, water, energy, etc.).

The Good

• It's very casual but you can pump up the difficulty if you want.
• You can give commands while paused.

The Bad

• Incredibly dull story and voice-acting.
• Missions require exact buildings to be built instead of e.g. "build housing for x people".
• It's impossible to tell what overland map areas are unexplored (you launch expeditions/build settlements).
• No auto-explore option either.
• No politics other than a "referendum election" (a what now?).
• Generally speaking all resources and needs are extremely basic.

The Ugly

The fifth map gates progress behind very high morale requirements (80-90). You can't progress until you've built a ton of relevant buildings and staffed them. Then you get an export mission, then another morale mission, then another export mission. Most buildings lack a group setting option which means that every time you have to visit dozens of buildings to change staffing priority and whether or not it can distribute certain goods. After a few hours (!) i just lost all interest in the game.

Conclusion

I like the idea of building a colony on an alien world and Aven Colony does lack some of the more annoying elements of other city-builders like traffic problems (Tropico) or tedious resource transportation (Surviving Mars).

However, the game is completely lifeless. There's a threadbare story told through a handful of bits of dialogue but it's not even (really) related to the actual gameplay. Early on someone has an accident so i expected to have to rescue them. Instead that all takes place off-screen.

The mission structure really hurts the game too. You basically just sit there waiting for the game to tell you what to do, otherwise you can't progress. They've actually managed to make a linear city-builder. There's just no point in playing this in a world with Tropico and other far superior games.