Aven Colony

Aven Colony is a planetary colonization, city-building simulator that salutes the memes of classic sci-fi while making a memorable impression all its own. The objective-driven campaign mode introduces mechanics and controls on a smooth difficulty curve which you can manage organically by how fast you expand your city and how rigorously you prepare for threats. While at times shallowly implemented, the trade, production, and expedition systems offer a variety of options for you to complete your goals. Simulation noobs will find this release easy to pick up, but only veterans can appreciate all the small details that went into Aven Colony's design.

I had an absolute blast playing through Aven. It’s as absorbing as it is relaxing, and it does a good job at bringing its own to the table whilst still retaining what makes city builders fun and challenging. The challenges it brings are unique and fun, and though there might be a few changes I’d personally like to see added, not having them doesn’t deduct much at all from the gameplay.

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.

Aven Colony is a well made city-building strategy game. Well-known solutions were improved and the end result makes you play for hours at a time. The "just one more building" syndrome is strong with this one - even irritating music and occasional graphical issues don't matter that much. Aven Colony is simply a good game.

It's less a trip to another world than a slice of this one, warts and all, carefully preserved in the middle of a bewitching, inaccessible wilderness. [Issue#310, p.116]

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.

A faithful genre piece, Aven Colony takes the socio-economic juggling of settlement building games like Tropico and Banished, transports it to space, and establishes a pretty successful outpost.

On consoles, Aven Colony, with its simplicity and colorful graphics, could be a good introduction to the genre. On PC, a much stronger tradition of city builders highlights some annoying flaws.

A decent, quite complex city builder that would benefit from more variety, larger scale and losing some unnecessary mechanics. [10/2017, p.56]

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]

A good city builder to play on consoles. On PC, however, it doesn't have much original content to offer.

Aven Colony could have been a great space sim manager: there are some good and original ideas, but the game is really easy, without a real challenge, and a lot of things simply don't work, gameplay-wise.

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.

Tactical city-sim for the sub-menu-phobic. [Issue#265, p.58]

Despite the time I've spent harping on Aven's issues, it's not necessarily a bad game. Mothership Entertainment has put in a lot of effort to try and create a threatening world for humanity to conquer. It certainly did the former, but the game fluctuates wildly from barely eking out an existence to being devoid of challenge. Humanity can do better on its first settlement among the stars.

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 myself was surprised at how negative this test was.

Aven Colony has the trappings of a good city-building game but simply lacks the depth to make it so. While the game looks great and plays well, the setting of space is underused outside of its aesthetic and the lack of variety or challenge inevitably leaves the game feeling dull.