introduction
You landed on a far away planet, your mothership orbiting in space and the task to start a new colony has been put on your shoulders. You start off building some solar panels, some barracks for your fellow colonists and a farm to grow some food you brought from Earth. What will you do next? Are you alone on this planet? Will you and your crew even survive in this unknown place? That is what you'll have to find out as Governor on this planet called Aven Prime.
From Mothership Entertainment, Aven Colony is a city-building and management sim that tells the story of humanity’s first settlement of an unknown world. Land on exotic Aven Prime, where you must construct and maintain the infrastructure and ensure the well-being of your citizens, all while dealing with the often harsh realities of an exotic alien world.
The studio’s combined repertoire of past games include the likes of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and more.
Aven Colony is in its Beta phase right now and will be launched in early 2017 on both Steam and itch.io simultaneously.
gameplay
The gameplay mechanics are basically the same as most of the city building games out there, and that's a good thing! Why fix something that isn't broken, right?
You move around with your arrow keys or move the mouse to the edges of the screen, zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, you know the drill. A new mechanic Aven Colony brings to the table, though, is the use of CCTV cameras. You can watch your colonists go to work and follow them around using your CCTV network. There isn't much else you can do with this now, though, but I hope the developers at Mothership Entertainment will do something cool with that!
See the video preview of Aven Colony from our editor DJPaultjeD:
Another new feature this game has is that you're now allowed to build outside of your "Sphere of Influence" I will call it. Your city has a border, and though it expands with every new building you place at the border, you are not allowed to place buildings too far from it. Basically, it tells you how far your drones and your power will reach. Also, all buildings have to be placed next to the road, as the road also transfers the oxygen into adjacent buildings.
The game goes easy on you when you just start off. But if you get too cocky and get to many colonists, the game will punish you harshly and let the majority of your colonists die. This is what happened in my game and connects to my biggest problem with the game. Though you can manage the amount of workers in a building, pretty much like Tropico did, you can not assign certain people to buildings. For example. If I have five workers left, and three buildings with all of them three slots for workers, I can disable one slot in all buildings, but there's still a chance those five workers will spread among only two of the buildings, leaving me wishing for some more colonists. But I guess it's just something to get used to.
performance
I do not have the beefiest of gaming rigs, but decent enough to play most new games on high settings. But my PC had some problems with Aven Colony. It took about three minutes to load up the starting screen. I was about to start my Task Manager when something happened. When I loaded up the tutorial campaign I even had to lower the settings to medium, and there weren't that many buildings placed yet! I can only fear what would happen when I have a thriving colony. I must say, I was running my recording software at that time so that could be part of the problem. Also, the game is still in Beta so the developers at Mothership Entertainment could also still be working on that.
But even on medium settings, the game looks stunning! The graphics are beautiful and the ambiance is spot on! Sound effects are good and the soundtrack is lovely.
All and all a good job!
verdict
Once the game is fully released I will do a proper verdict for this game, but as of now, it looks like it's going to get a very high rating. The pros weigh much higher than the cons and for now, I would advise all strategy gamers and city builder enthusiasts to keep an eye on this game!
An interview with the developers from Mothership Entertainment will be posted here later, so keep tabs on this site!
What do you think about Aven Colony? Are you excited for it? Let us know down in the comments!
