Aven Colony Review
The time has finally come again. Another city building strategy game about maintaining a colony on a distant world and keeping it running smoothly while of course dealing with the sudden emergency like no food, no water, giant worms or all of the above at the same time.
Seamlessly go from top down to any angle.
Winter close up.
With Aven Colony you get all the classic requirements of a colony. Need space to live in, need food and water and enough for everyone, need entertainment, keep moral up, give things they need like service robots and personal holo units (which I think are either future smart phones or Holodecks. Either way my colonists can never get enough of them so I’m thinking it’s phones.) All of that is well and good but you have to get the resources in order to makes those things or have something to trade for it. The resource you need to do this is nanites which are converted from iron and copper or kelko sludge (which is a planet you can grow) but with kelko it takes 8 times longer to process into a nanite so it’s only useful when you’ve starved the map of resources. Power comes from turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and the ultimate power planet that uses Zorium (another minable resource that are used in a specific power planet or traded for other things) to keep your colony powered during the winter months without having to build an entire section of a colony dedicated to solar panels.
Having housing close to the things colonists work at help them. If there home is too far away they just won’t walk there anymore (Why isn’t there any golf carts or Segways in the future?) and that building will go without workers until you build housing closer. Air quality is another requirement. Since the colony is sealed to the outside and certain buildings produce pollution, you need to keep the air clean by building either an intake fan (cleans the air from outside but vulnerable to external threats like viruses and gases) or an air filter (more expensive but more efficient.) If the air quality isn’t good enough your colonists will get sick and need medical care and of course that means you need a hospital which entails more things like medicine to maintain people and if you don’t have a steady stream people will, of course start dying.
Get up close and personal with your colonists with CCTV and find out what they’re thinking.
Winter is a big deal across the board. During the winter all solar panels work at half power, farms stop working but greenhouses work at half capacity so you better have enough stored until the next season. Along with the above, bad weather happens during winter and damaging lightning can hit your colony, damaging or destroying parts of your colony if you don’t have lightning rods. Added threat during winter, ice shards. They are so big and fall so quickly that they will damage buildings. If you have plasma turrets they can intercept them but by default they fire very slowly and the only way to make them fire faster is a researched boost to them.
And if lightning and ice shards weren’t bad enough, regardless of the time of year, other things will show themselves to your colony. Giant worms that come out of the ground and damage your colony and won’t leave until you hurt them enough (can’t be killed by your hand as far as I know.) Alien plague that will get them all sick and eventually die unless you have a hospital with plague medication ready. And the Creep, which is basically the outer space version of fire. They latch onto buildings and begin to slowly destroy them. You need to build a scrubber drone in order to deal with them or else the building will slowly die and then of course spread to nearby buildings. These creatures arrive by either showing up off map (with a warning beforehand, like all disastrous things mentioned before) or when you have an expedition building (a dock for a scout vessel that searches around your area of the planet) they can pick it up and do an emergency return back to base before the ship dies which then spreads to your colony.
Suffice to say you’ll have your hands full most the time playing this game. Either needing to find more resources or expand more for places for people to stay. Since the maps you play tend to be on the large side, you have a lot of places to expand to but it takes time to get that far. The more people you need the more places they need to stay the more food and water you need, etc. etc. Then unemployment comes into the mix after you had more people working on buildings you’ve now gotten rid of because they’re no longer needed. The more unemployed, the more unhappy they become and moral drops, then when elections come up you could be voted out, of course ending the game.
Turn on boosts, turn the batteries on if out of power, ration food and/or water, or don’t let people switch jobs or move to different housing.
The feeling of this game, besides the euthanization (yes, when you’re full on space and recycle a housing unit, anyone that can’t find another home, regardless of distance, will be euthanized) is a decent game. Obviously a lot of refining and love went into making this game and the devs have said they’ll be adding more down the line so you can tell that they love working on it. And the game is very pretty, runs well and is on the Unreal 4 engine. A small problem with the game is that it becomes a bit empty and repetitive after the first couple missions. With almost every building available right from the start during the story mode (and all available in sandbox mode) and only research items having to unlock (boosts for drones, enhancers for people, no buildings locked) you tend to get used to building the colony the same way over and over again. Story missions present you with restrictions (an early mission gives you a map with lots of fertile land and almost no iron/copper deposits so you have to trade food to build which takes a long time) so that mixes things up but still, the repetitiveness doesn’t really go away. If you just like to build and maintain then it’s good but if you’re expecting something along the lines of “gotta keep going to get something,” other than the story line you’re not going to get much out of it.
Overall this game is good and it does feel like it’s worth the price (if it cost more I’d say no) but it really comes down to you if whether or not you’d like to try this. With no multiplayer but free content coming and you’re on the fence about it, that might change in time.
Review code provided by developer.
