Aven Colony

 PlayStation 4
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
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  1. 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 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    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 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!    … Expand
  2. JayJayJay898989
    Jan 2, 2018
    7
    The gameplay is good, but as soon as you become rich with Nanites "The In-Game Currency" There's only so much you can buy. You can splash your cash on literally anything, and there's no risk of becoming skint. I think this game does have loads of fun at the start, but it becomes a bore as soon as you become rich, as there's nothing more to buy.
  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 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    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.    … Expand

Awards & Rankings

95
#95 Most Shared PS4 Game of 2017

Critic Reviews

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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
  1. 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.
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  2. 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]
  3. 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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