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.

While you’ll be working on structures to maintain adequate energy levels and suitable living conditions for your alien planet inhabitants, 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.

The game offers a couple of tutorial levels which outline the basics. And when I say the basics, I mean you’ll be done with them in a few minutes. The game doesn’t hold your hand here, but it also wants to make sure you know how to get going. It’s not until you’re in the first level and accepting missions that you really get a feel for what you’re doing. And even here, if you’re not up-to-date with the genre like I am, it will likely be overwhelming at first.

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. While they offer rewards for completing them, they are more or less there to guide you if you have no idea how to approach the creation of your colony.

Many games from this genre have made the transition to consoles, but it’s not often that they do well in the space. Certain genres don’t only work better on particular platforms because of the way they control (keyboard/mouse vs controller), but the audience for each platform also has games they anticipate and desire. For a long time, if you were into first person shooters, you wanted them on a PC or an Xbox console. PlayStation had them on the PS3 and prior, but that wasn’t their focus. If you wanted weird indie games, it was PC or PS3. Some crazy Japanese game where you play as animals in an apocalyptic Tokyo? PlayStation. What about something easy to pick up, family friendly (for the most part), and addictive? Nintendo. So whenever a genre decides to jump from the norm, it’s interesting to see how it’ll fair, especially with consumers.

I’m pleased to say that the game handles really well with a controller. Not only is it fairly intuitive, the UI is never intrusive, despite having more options than you could possibly want in a game. Viewing different overlays, your current trades, and what foods are consumable has never been easier in a console version of a city sim. You’ll also receive a lot of warnings and accomplishments that you can either view or hide – these are helpful in knowing what’s happening with your colony, although chances are there will be perpetual warnings you won’t alleviate, causing this to be a bit of an annoyance. But as I said, it’s why there’s an option to hide them.

Of course, if you know the genre, you know these games take time. We’re talking hours per level here; even with the progression of time sped up by 8. And chances are you don’t want to leave the game at that speed, as a lot can happen within that time-frame. While it certainly helps with the creation of your resources and building your colony up with immigrants if you’re trying to do so, it can also lead to the destruction of your base depending on emergencies. Luckily, the game will slow things down for you if anything too serious comes up, allowing you to deal with it before you lose all your progress.

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.

9  out of 10

Pros

• Alien Landscape
• Intuitive Controls
• Beautiful Imagery

Cons

• Time Sink

Aven Colony was developed by Mothership Entertainment and published by Team17. The game launches on PS4, X1, and PC July 25th, 2017 for $29.99. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Aven Colony, check out the official site.

 

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