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After the success of Cities: Skylines on Xbox One, I've found myself enamored with the city-sim genre ever since. I've previously written about Surviving Mars, which is an in-development space city builder heading to Xbox One, from the same publisher as Cities: Skylines. I've also previously reviewed Planetbase, which is a modest take on what it might be like to attempt to build a colony on another planet, complete with all the hazards you might expect with space faring.
I found Planetbase to be an addictive title in short bursts but found the lack of creativity possible in the game to be a little frustrating. Thus, I had high hopes for Aven Colony to achieve where Planetbase didn't. Aven Colony is now available for Xbox One and PC, and while it's invariably deeper than Planetbase, it's certainly not perfect.
The Cerulean Vale DLC is included in this version. 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.
Aven Colony: What you'll like
In Aven Colony, your task is to set up and survive on various types of alien planets. There's a lot of gorgeous sci-fi art work to be found in the game, from alien tundras, to extra terrestrial jungles, and majestic, exoplanet deserts. Sci-fi fans will be in for a visual treat, particularly if you like giant sandworms as seen in Dune.
Aven Colony has sandbox modes, and also a series of campaign levels with light-hearted humor and some rudimentary alien-artifact hunting plot points. The campaign will teach you about Aven Colony's deep and varied mechanics, while injecting some interstellar context into the mix. Aven Colony's campaign isn't going to win it any Oscars, but it's a relatively interesting way to learn the game, and hey, easy gamerscore.
What will give Aven Colony its longevity is the sandbox mode, which grants full access to all the game's features and systems for building your very own space colony.
While Aven Colony is a city-builder, it also has strategic elements owing to the generally hazardous nature of space colonization. You have to ensure your colonists are provided with adequate food, oxygen, and water, first and foremost, with entertainment, employment, and health coming in later on.
The primary resources in Aven Colony are excavated from mines, such as iron, and some sci-fi minerals like zorium. Different materials allow you to craft different things, such as food types, medicine, and all-important nanites, which are a type of synthetic robot swarm responsible for forming buildings.
As your colony grows, you'll be able to build space ports to trade for materials and other products that might be hard to find on your existing planet, in addition to handling immigration to help build your population. People don't like having babies in space, apparently.
Eventually you'll even be able to build an expedition center, which allows you to explore the outskirts of your planet in a separate mini-game. On the expedition map, you can find supplies, resources, and even alien artifacts, which grant special bonuses and abilities to your colony, such as a large energy overshield.
Aven Colony has pretty fun gameplay. You'll construct square bases on a grid, essentially, and your job is to manage the flow of colonists as they move from home, work, and recreation, while ensuring they have adequate resources and health.
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Aven Colony: What you won't like
The game throws curveballs like bad weather (limiting farm production), alien spores (that erode your base), and even toxic gas clouds (that choke your air-intake systems) to keep you on your toes, but it won't be long until you settle into an almost mindless pattern of knowing what to build, when and where to account for every potential problem.
There simply isn't enough dynamism in Aven Colony's overall gameplay to make it interesting over long periods of time. Once you realize you have to build farms on grassy areas, build oxygen filters and residences every few grid squares, and cover the place in lightning rods and anti-alien spore turrets, there's not much more to gameplay, sadly.
You could probably say the same about most city-building games, but Aven Colony doesn't really give you the tools to get creative, either, which would have made up for the repetitive simulation gameplay. Most bases will follow the same sorts of construction patterns, due to the game's relatively constrained systems and lack of building choices.
Aven Colony maintains a solid frame rate even when your colony grows to larger sizes, but the trade off on Xbox One is some fairly aggressive resolution and texture scaling that can be a little jarring at times, but it's hardly what I'd call a deal breaker.
Final thoughts
Aven Colony is a capable sci-fi city-builder with great visuals and satisfying gameplay systems. The different alien landscapes do provide some welcome variety, but you'll exhaust Aven Colony's gameplay mechanics fairly quickly, but considering the game costs only $30, I think it's a fair price for the overall package.
Pros:
- Fun sci-fi construction gameplay.
- Great art and visuals.
- Well priced at $30.
3.5out of 5
Aven Colony is a solid sci-fi city builder over all, and while it's a bit thin on management mechanics, fans of the genre will enjoy what it has to offer.
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Well it’s finally here! Just last month I wrote up my preview of Aven Colony and I think it’s fair to say I had little less than unwavering praise for the city-building game. Now that I’ve seen more of the game, I can say that much of what enamored me with the title in the beginning can be found all throughout the rest of the campaign. This is wonderful as at no point did I feel like I was simply “going through the motions” as I have with many other similar games in the past. But what does Aven Colony do that sets it apart from these other experiences? Why can I essentially do the same thing across multiple levels without getting tired of it all being the same? The short answer is level variety, but let’s dive deeper into what makes Aven Colony great.
For those that don’t know, Aven Colony’s campaign mode follows the journey of an up-and-coming governor as they build, maintain, and often fix various colonies across several different planets. Their story isn’t all that important by itself, because the real plot happens outside of the actual gameplay. This overarching story includes many different characters (all excellently voiced) and several different reasons why the governor must attend to different colonies. Once the reason for visiting a colony has been explained, the player is given control over nearly everything and let loose to reach the main goal however they see fit. While choosing how and where to build various structures and buildings, the colony being built will grow and come alive with people. In order to keep the player on track, the side characters provide several optional objectives that can be completed for small rewards that will help the colony out. These objectives tend to coincide with the goal of the colony the player is currently working on.
The nine campaign missions (after two tutorial missions) are completely different, each with their own challenges and goals to accomplish. This is the beauty of Aven Colony. By spending the time to make each colony feel unique and different, players don’t even realize they are mostly doing the same thing across the whole campaign. Realistically, all that needs to be done to succeed is keep track of various numbers and bars that will determine how well the player is doing. Most of this is monitored on one of two areas and are rather simple to take care of. Nearly all issues that arise can be solved by constructing certain buildings in key areas. Without going into too much detail, I’ll simply say that Aven Colony is the perfect amount of complicated without taking away from the overall enjoyment. I believe that a lot of this comes from how easy it is to keep track of everything that’s going on within your colony.
I truly can’t stress how nice it is that I can fully tell how people feel and what needs to be changed to improve their moods and keep my colony happy. This becomes especially useful when you look at just how many things could go wrong or hurt your colony. Just off the top of my head I can think of some simple things like: power, jobs for colonists, air purity, nanite manufacturing, and housing. But these pale in comparison to issues like: crime, lightning/shard storm safety, protection/purging of plague spores, food production, winter preparation, and even freaking colonist commute. That’s right, if colonists have to walk too far, they will riot! Since there are so many things to keep tabs on, the pressure to pay attention is fairly consistent and keeps the player engaged. But when the player does catch up with all of these factors, they can always take on those optional objectives from earlier that can even push the game’s narrative forward.
This is only true in the campaign mode of course. There is also a sandbox mode that can be endless if the player wants. This mode is customizable and allows different players to create different challenges for themselves. The hardcore may make a map that has very little resources while a more casual player may take out referendums (elections that can end your game if lost). This customization means that the various planets can all be played in different ways and create new experiences each time a new map is created. Because of this, while the campaign is rather rigid and offers a specific challenge every time, sandbox mode makes the game fun time and time again, offering new challenges each time. Honestly, I find it hard to find much wrong with this title.
There’s the gameplay, which works wonderfully and is never terribly confusing. Even when the gameplay begins to loop, it never really feels repetitive or boring. The art and sound look awesome and sound even better. All the structures have detailed models with fun to watch construction cycles. Each character has an excellent voice actor and the background music changes often enough to be noticeable without being distracting. There are many different difficulty settings for players of all abilities. There’s just nothing to fault here. If you enjoy city building, you will more than likely love Aven Colony.
Aven Colony (Reviewed on Xbox One)
Excellent. Look out for this one.
Aven Colony makes for a prime example of how a game can transcend its genre and be fun whether or not you like other games like it. Showcasing detailed visuals, immersive voice acting, an engaging gameplay loop, and enough content to satisfy most players, this title has the potential to make a lasting impression on many gamers this year. If you enjoy city building games, you owe it to yourself to play Aven Colony.
This game was supplied by the publisher or relevant PR company for the purposes of review
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