Aven Colony

I feel like the game devs have abandoned this game entirely. I have played the entire game through til the end and although it is a weird cross that cannot decide if it is a city building sim or a management sim (and fails at both) but since the last update a long while ago it has a nasty habit of crashing within 2 minutes of opening the game. And the ONLY fix is to disable it through Windows firewall or play offline. There are threads upon threads on this topic specifically.

I'm a huge fan of Banished and Cities Skylines, but after playing the demo for Star Trek Outposts Unknown, i realized i've never seen a sci-fi colony builder at this scale, so i did some hunting, and came across Aven Colony. I was like 'perfect, and cheap too!' i bought it on sale for $3, and I can safely say i got more than that out of it, so i do not at all regret my purchase. Well if that's the case, why don't i recomend it? Oh boy, if you're still reading, lets get into it. First things first, the game would crash after launching. Apparently it uses an antiquated anti-cheat that no longer works. I had to create a special rule in my firewall to disallow both instances of it's .exe from communicating with the internet to get the game to launch. This took me down a deep well of googling where the developers appear to have vanished and ceased production of the game. Afaik nobody even knows it exists, so the actual concurrent players is very small and support for any problems with the game is nonexistent beyond the steam forums. How does it play? I actually quite like how it plays. It's a fun time figuring out what makes the colony work and what doesn't. However I found some.. strange.. situations that the game finds itself in, and solves with imperialistic or downright unethical solutions. > The Crime Problem- Happy citizens in any city appear to generate crime. Unhappy citiizens dont want to work, leading to more crime. Apparently crime is an abstract figure that sews discontentment among the populace and can only be solved with police drones, martial law, or mind altering substances, and happy citizens will commit crimes regardless of how well provided for they are. This made me feel disgusting every time i had to rely on police drones to increase the happiness of a city, it's like the colonists are begging for oppressive regimes and are unhappy when they don't get it. > Nonexistent homeless. This ones really bad. If you find yourself in a situation where you've got more citizens then homes, the surplus population is automatically euthanized, and a popup scolds the player for allowing this to happen. Despite there being plenty of tunnels for citizens to throw down a blanket and reside on the street, the game would rather color you a murderer and tank your citizens morale, all this because i simply wanted to utilize a bit of imminent domain while moving an apartment building from one place to another. > Bad Writing This game clearly has a budget. The art is great, the UX is nice, the sound design and voice work is.. expansive. Theres a -lot- of work that's gone into this game and it shows. However the writing is often hand holding, theres a lot of telling instead of showing, and most of the time i dont understand why, in a world with starships and rovers, i have to build a tunnel to a mine thats extremely far away. Couldn't they just drive? Most of the time the colony ship just insists you have to put a colony somewhere to progress an abstract story along, rather than actually making you feel like the outpost you're working on is viable, important, or even necessary. The best level in the game is one where something wrong happens on the colony ship, and you have to construct a colony that HAS to handle as many people moving in as possible, forcing you to speedrun through a lot of the early game in order to support an outpost that can keep 1000 citizens alive. This is immediately cut down by the regular pop ups from command whining that you're not making enough food or water, instead of actually helping you with it. Then, if you do badly enough, the refugees will vote you out of being mayor and you'll never finish the mission... Why would anyone in that situation demand I be replaced by another when i havn't even lost any lives?? The game seems to have it's priorities in very strange places. After all that, i stuck with the game, until i realized I had figured out what it took to build a sucessful colony, and it was suddenly, no longer fun. The writing wasn't keeping me engaged enough to learn more about the story, and i no longer wanted to rebuild a new colony, relearn the same upgrades, play the same micromanagement with inventory and supplies, over and over from scratch for each new mission, and I simply uninstalled it. Thanks for reading this far. Aven Colony had a lot of potential, but made a lot of strange decisions that ultimately turned me off. Idk, if it's on sale, give it a go, see what you think.

I have heard many people directly compare this game to Surviving Mars, Frostpunk, or Planetbase - I haven't played any of those so I can't state one way or another. What I can say however is that this is a "space sim" city building game, filled with all sorts of random events, and can be quite difficult at times. It's a deceptive city builder insofar as the hubris it allows you to garner will be stripped away completely once the finite resources run dry. Obviously it allows you to make due without them through other methods but it is significantly worse by every measurable metric. It deceives you into thinking that having a massive storage of resources will save you - well it won't. This game doesn't ♥♥♥♥ around; you could be at the absolute top of your game and all it takes is one massive storm, drought, famine, electrical gride failure, etc etc to destroy mountains of progress; an absolute entropy trap. I suppose it's actually quite humbling. It truly is a machine that eventually consumes itself Then again the ultimate goal is seeing how far you can possibly get until something destroys your way of life and the entire empire comes tumbling and crumbling down. One moment you'll feel like you've conquered the planet, the next you'll be scrambling to keep the people's heads above the water. It does not hold back. Although if you get to that point you'll probably do what I did and had NEVER done up until that point: Declare Martial Law Force overtime Immigration bans Emigration bans Job switching bans Water rationing etc etc etc The people vote, and if you aren't demonstrating a future with prospects they will vote your ass out and it's game over. (Hence full authoritarianism) It's a brutally difficult game disguised as a casual city builder but beneath the surface it is anything but

Loved playing this game before it was available on steam, spent over 100 hours playing. Game crashes after start up and after looking at other reviews it seems other people are having the same issue. Devs need to update so the game can run on Windows 11 but I am just going to assume they don't care.

SUPER!!

[h1] Does not work on modern pcs [/h1] Aven Colony does not seem to work on modern pcs. I tried coming back today after a few years on my windows 11 pc. The game crashes within minutes of starting. The furthest I got was one minute into a new game before a crash. Unless you have an older pc, do not get this.

Suddenly stopped working, and there's no response from the developer.

I played and won the entire campaign, and got about 90% of the achievements. It gets repetitive and worse, mindless. Especially re-researching the exact same tech in each new colony.

if i am going to sold a dud then i feel it is only right to return the FU to the developer and publisher. i am currently imagining you both as someone tied bent over naked between two palm trees while a very VERY angry Rhino is getting a good half mile runup behind you, which is clearly how so many devs and publishers imagine us customers

I was somewhat hesitant to buy this, given the mixed, and occasionally very negative, reviews. I've actually been quite pleasantly surprised by it and feel the game is underrated. I've not encountered any performance issues at all, and it's turning out to be a perfectly competent and relaxing colony management sim. It's nothing mind-blowing, but is reasonably polished, immersive and, in my opinion, fun! The music and voice acting in particular is great, and it's a fun way to pass the time if you're a strategy/sim fan and want something a little more streamlined. An absolute steal on deep discount, which it currently is!