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 haveThinking 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.… Expand
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