Aven Colony

 PlayStation 4
Metascore
73

Mixed or average reviews - based on 16 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 16
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 16
  3. Negative: 0 out of 16
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  1. Digitally Downloaded
    Jul 25, 2017
    90
    Without involving the micromanagement of something like Transport Giant, it’s also a game that offers just enough complexity to offer players a management challenge, and a sense of rewarding satisfaction when they’ve built up a sustainable, large, city. The story mode itself is quite poor, but as with any good city builder, all the fun’s in the sandbox mode anyway, and unleashing both your inner creative and inner city planner at once.
  2. Video Chums
    Jul 25, 2017
    88
    Aven Colony is easy to recommend partly because there's so little else like it on console but also because it's an excellent and engrossing example of the genre. Whichever platform you play on, you'll have fun creating a new frontier in outer space.
  3. PlayStation Country
    Jul 27, 2017
    80
    City building games don't usually find their way onto consoles and rarely are they as well-executed as Aven Colony.
  5. Let's Play Video Games
    Jul 26, 2017
    80
    Aven Colony is a fantastic city simulator. It isn’t as economically complex as Anno, and it isn’t as obsessed with micromanaging as Cities Skylines, but it does offer a gripping story mode – a rarity for the genre – and a compelling twist on the usual expansionist mechanics that combines Star Trek-style optimism of exploration with the ruthless, survivalist reality of The Martian. It’s a city sim, Jim, but not as we know it.
  6. Slant Magazine
    Jul 25, 2017
    80
    The game strikes a superb balance of introducing its systems and giving one enough freedom to live and learn.
  7. IGN Spain
    Jul 25, 2017
    80
    Aven Colony is a nice alternative to Cities: Skylines and a well made city builder. Even when it gets boring or repetitive it's still a nice game.
  8. PlayStation Universe
    Jul 25, 2017
    75
    As a seasoned city-builder, Aven Colony is a solid game that has translated remarkably well to the PlayStation 4.It’s incredibly fun and challenging and optimising your colony to no end will keep you entertained.
  9. Cubed3
    Mar 7, 2018
    70
    Aven Colony is an addictive city-building game set on a planet called Aven Prime, with a science-fiction twist. Growing a small colony into a massively sprawling cityscape is a very fulfilling experience, with plenty of hazards and obstacles along the way. Whether dealing with the internal struggles of governing a wide population, or dealing with spores and creeps, there is always something that needs to be attended to. It is not without inconsistent bugs and slowdown issues, but ensuring the majority is kept happy is still possible to attain a re-election. It is the key to further living out the fantasy of growing human civilisation on a vastly unexplored and mysterious planet.
  10. Playstation Official Magazine UK
    Aug 24, 2017
    70
    It's initially very engrossing, but once you've established a colony or two, there's very little left to keep you hooked. [Sept 2017, p.91]
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  11. PlaySense
    Aug 9, 2017
    70
    Aven Colony surprised us, with its decent controls and deep gameplay. However, a clichéd storyline and unbalanced difficulty keep the game from receiving higher marks.
  12. The Digital Fix
    Jul 27, 2017
    70
    Offering many hours of solid city building gameplay, with the potential to play from your couch and bringing to the table an actual campaign rather than just countless sandboxes, Aven Colony is an excellent little title, which we can particularly recommend for console players.
  13. Metro GameCentral
    Jul 25, 2017
    70
    One of the best SimCity clones on consoles, whose streamlined gameplay is accessible if not necessarily very original.
  14. TheSixthAxis
    Jul 25, 2017
    70
    The first impressions of Aven Colony are great, as you build your first colony, finding your way on this alien world. It doesn’t take too long before you start to see the limitations, whether by design or by mistake, leaving this as a city builder that’s easy to pick up and play, but one that could do with a little more depth.
  15. Push Square
    Jul 25, 2017
    70
    When Aven Colony is at its best, it's making a strong case for the viability of the real-time strategy genre on console via an addictive mix of easy-to-grasp city building mechanics, a surprisingly intriguing sci-fi story, and a tight campaign that offers variety and never outstays its welcome. Unfortunately, it has a number of annoying technical issues which -- while they might not affect every player -- are persistent enough to undermine the experience depending on your tolerance for slow down and hard crashes. If you can weather the storm of technical shortcomings Aven Colony throws at you, you'll find an impressive, accessible strategy game that feels right at home on PS4.
  16. Games Master UK
    Aug 10, 2017
    62
    High-octane it ain't, but if you're after something mellow to wallow in, fill your (space) boots. [Sept 2017, p.79]
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  17. PlayStation LifeStyle
    Jul 25, 2017
    60
    Though the campaign is unimaginative and some areas are not fleshed out as well as they could have been, the game is still addictive stuff. But, once you’ve run through the campaign you’re only left with the sandbox mode, which grinds to a halt as soon as you start to do well.

Awards & Rankings

95
#95 Most Shared PS4 Game of 2017

User Reviews

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User Score
7.2

Mixed or average reviews- based on 19 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 11 out of 19
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 19
  3. Negative: 2 out of 19
  1. GBG_Jason
    Sep 28, 2017
    9
    Thinking back to my family’s first computer purchased in 1996, I can tell you a couple of the games I played on it. Aside from Full Tilt!Thinking back to my family’s first computer purchased in 1996, I can tell you a couple of the games I played on it. Aside from Full Tilt! Pinball, one of my favorites to boot up and spend hours with was Sim City 2000. Thinking back to it, I don’t remember there being a whole lot of instruction, but there was something so mesmerizing about creating a living city from nothing. There have been plenty of games since this, but few successfully make the jump to consoles.

    Aven Colony is a city building/strategy game that takes you beyond Earth – you’ll be colonizing alien landscapes, flora and fauna included. It features many elements that you’ve seen before, and while it offers direction with missions, following them strictly can inadvertently lead to your demise. While series like Tropico and Cities are published on a fairly regular basis, my experience with the genre has been fairly limited, as they often come off as overly complicated with statistics. It wasn’t until I failed the first level of this that I got a feel for how to properly play the game – mind you, it took about 20 minutes to actually be told I died after giving up, even with time sped up by 8 times. But I was out of a resource I needed, and I was unable to attain more in a manner that I found suitable.

    You’ll be working on structures to maintain adequate energy levels and suitable living conditions for your alien planet inhabitants, and you’ll also need to make sure that they are happy with everything in their lives. Do they have the proper medical facilities? Are they able to relax somewhere? Is the commute to work too long? All of these factors play into whether or not you’ll be voted for in the next referendum. The game offers an assortment of overlays to check on air quality, water, energy, happiness, etc. If you’re into numbers and graphs, this game has got you sorted. While all the statistics are normally off-putting, this does a good job of making it intuitive as you play.

    When playing you have several options for the progression of time, which ranges from stopping it altogether to going 8x the normal speed. When I first started I felt the need to stop everything as I didn’t want to miss any events that were happening, and I especially didn’t want the winter portion of a Sol (read: year) to sneak up on me while I wasn’t ready. When winter hits, your farms will stop altogether as the ground freezes, and things like greenhouses and solar power is cut drastically in terms of output. Because of this, you need to make sure you have adequate storage for food and water, in addition to power supplies that aren’t reliant on the sun. Each region comes with its own share of things to learn, including dangers. My second time through the level I was much more laid back with the progression, never stopping it as I realized it wasn’t necessary.

    It wouldn’t very well be an alien world without alien inhabitants. Unfortunately, they don’t really take too kindly to the human immigrants. The game introduces them slowly, but they soon become a threat worth building defenses for. While initially only a drone that can scrub the infection out of a building is required, you’re soon attacked by what looks like the Graboids from Tremors. These are much more detrimental to your colony than that of the natural disasters such as lightning or shard storms. To liken it to Sim City 2000 once again, think of when you unleash a monster upon the city and it goes up in flames within moments. It’s quite humbling after spending hours to fill the terrain – sort of like when you make something really cool out of Lego with your kid, and he tears it apart in seconds. It’s similar to that, except you are able to retaliate in this. And that becomes a major part of it as you progress.

    While the game has a “story mode” with certain objectives for each map, albeit a bit vague, the game also provides a sandbox mode. Here you are provided with missions the same as in the other mode, but there is no end goal. You simply create a colony however you see fit. This is best for people that enjoy the process more than the goal oriented gameplay. As the game is sure to tell you, the missions that they offer are merely suggestions.

    Unless you hate the genre, chances are you are going to dig this. It has some difficulty spikes that may seem unreasonable at times, but it also offers a myriad of difficulty options to choose from prior to starting each map, allowing you to decide just how difficult it will become. It can be a bit unclear at times as to what you are supposed to do, but is the unknown in a game really a bad thing? Last time I checked, having a bit of mystery in a game made it that much better. Aven Colony takes what you know about the genre and not only adds its own flare, but improves upon it by adding some much needed strategy elements.    … Full Review »
  2. rushtybaby
    Aug 13, 2017
    7
    Decent game and very pretty. Gets a bit bogged down on PS4 (original) when the city starts to get big but manageable. Once you've figuredDecent game and very pretty. Gets a bit bogged down on PS4 (original) when the city starts to get big but manageable. Once you've figured out the gameplay there's not much variation after that.

    Campaign mode is pretty interesting, a good way to spend a few evenings but the game really needs some more variation in adversity scenarios for you to overcome. Once you've figured out the crux of each mission there's very little else to do.

    Seriously needs some DLC. There's so much potential here!    … Full Review »
  3. tomvs123
    Jan 15, 2018
    5
    The game is average and feels a bit incomplete. But you'll likely get some enjoyment out of it if you like city-building games.

    It's like    The game is average and feels a bit incomplete. But you'll likely get some enjoyment out of it if you like city-building games.

    It's like SimCity, but with less-involved city managing and a bigger focus on resource gathering. As far as building goes, you'll be primarily concerned with energy (electricity) and nanites (building currency).

    Nanites are basically mined by your colonists and you use these to build buildings. They don't work like taxes in similar games. You can get them in other ways, but mining them is by far the most efficient. The problem with these is that you'll eventually deplete your mines and you'll need to resort to the much-less efficient methods, which makes expanding your city painfully slow.

    Managing power works similarly. After you plug all of the set geothermal vents on a map with power stations, you must mine a specific rock to get a good power supply. And after your mines are depleted, you'll need to resort to the much-less efficient power methods: Solar and Wind. Wind is near-worthless and solar has one big drawback: efficiency drops by half in the winter, so you must create double the amount of solar panels needed in summer to survive winter. Batteries can be created to help mitigate this, but they must be manually turned on each winter.

    Resource storage is a thing in this game and is a bit of a pain. Your colonists get unhappy if they don't have a set amount of food and water in storage (per colonist). So you'll end up with thousands of units of stored food and water that's never used. Winter doesn't deplete your food amount that much and there's no natural disasters that cause you to run low on food/water, so I don't get why it's necessary. So you'll spend a lot of resources creating and powering storage depots to keep your colonist morale high.

    Building variety is quite low. I can think of 6 different building types that are useful and that you'll be copying and pasting over and over when trying to expand your colony. The one outlier is the expedition center, which you can use to send ships on expeditions (outside of your city map) to collect resources and complete story objectives. Expeditions aren't very interactive and invove only clicking on an objective, telling your ship to go there, and then waiting 10 minutes for it to arrive.

    Interacting with your citizens is uninteresting. Your roads are tunnels in this game, so you can't see them very well. Even when you've got 120 in a building, you only see a couple at a time walking in the tunnels. So when you're looking at the game from a normal-city-building distance, your city roads(tunnels) look empty and uninhabited. There's no interesting traffic or traffic jams to deal with in this game.

    Employment is a problem in this game. People must be employed or they'll get unhappy. So you'll reach a point where you don't actually need any more chemical plants or mills, but you create them and leave them inactive just so people can be employed. I suppose they're happy with being employed and doing nothing...

    I found plasma turrets to be fairly interesting. You place them and they automatically shoot meteors, spores, creeps, or ancient defense robots. Those are the only real threats in the game and they all just fly at you from outside the map and attempt to infect or damage your buildings. If only there was more threats you could defend your city from.

    The issues I've listed above are really only a problem when you're in free mode, where you can build your own city however you'd like. With every city, you get to a point (normally around 600-1,000 citizens), where you've built all of the interesting stuff and to expand more, you'll just repeat the same habitats and mills over and over.

    Campaign mode is what makes the game worth it to me. Through about 10 different locations/scenarios, you're given specific goals so that you can progress the story and learn about the species who used to inhabit the planet. Usually at about the time your city becomes too big to have any more fun with, you'll be moving on to the next campaign to build a new city. The story is interesting, reasonable, and fairly well voice-acted. Just don't expect anything amazing, and you should be pleased with it.    … Full Review »
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