Aven Colony

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.