We’ve not had the best of luck when it comes to city simulation genre. Most heavy weights that focus their gameplay on developing large scale inhabitants with complex systems and rewarding elements have failed in recent years and given up their place at the table. Yet it seems that some developers at keen to revisit the beloved genre and bring it back to its glory days. Aven Colony is not far away from release, but we wanted to give you a sneak peek at what to expect.
Developed by Mothership Entertainment, Aven Colony is a Sci-fi, Strategy game that aims to deliver on an intelligent and engaging sense of city building and management on an alien planet. Players will become leader during the Human colonisation of an alien planet known as Aven Prime, where news colonies are built for humanity to expand across the planet’s surface.
Players are tasked with overseeing the construction of these colonies across Aven Prime and to manage it various resources from food, water and power to ensure the survival of the colony. The colony must be built from scratch and over time additional colonists will arrive as the colony expands.
There are a vast amount of gameplay systems active during your time on Aven Prime, making the experience much more immersive and the world highly organic to observe. Players will start by building small settlements, usually consisting of mining areas, power plants, farms and residences. There are many different classes of buildings which all have vital purposes in the game world ranging from oxygen creation, living quarters, food cultivation and resource mining.
Everything is managed from a “God view” which we’ve seen from many other simulation games such as Black and White and the Sims. Aven Prime keeps its interfaces well managed and clear as to not upset the balance or create any difficulty in interacting with the environments of HUDs. There are twelve different menus which give the player information about the colony and control over certain factors in the colony. These menus include details on the citizens in the colony along with employment status, commuting, citizen happiness, crime levels and resource management including electricity, water, air and crops. The menus and HUDs are managed/designed in an efficient manner without feeling complicated.
Aven Prime has many factors to evolve it into something that seems vastly complex, but early stages are kind enough to guide you through and ensure mechanics and logics in the game world are explained clearly. Going through simple world building to more structured elements such as rationing and controlling crime rates are spoken through in step by step guides.
There are plenty of interesting dynamics in the game world that have major effects on your progression and present a compelling sense of challenge. Factors such as a day and night-cycle can present dangers when at night time, freezing temperatures will stop food growth and solar panels don't generate electricity. This leads to difficult choices on how the food should be rationed and which colonists needs power the most.
I also found many other challenges present in the game that involved natural elements with environmental conditions including storms, dust devils, toxic gas and shard storms. But there’s also alien lifeforms to deal with and even the people in the colony can turn their backs on you. The morale system within Aven Prime measures your effectiveness as leader and doing a poor job by restricting food to much or providing living conditions, rise in unemployment and crime rates could lead to your dismissible after an election.
Aven Prime is presenting itself to be a vastly complex and highly engaging simulator that dives deep into city building. With plenty of classic elements seen in the genre before but with new twists added in could make this a sure winner! Stay tuned for our review next week!
