ExoColony: Planet Survival

Give it a few months of development, pretty clunky atm

Great potential but right now unplayable due to a bug that randomly relocates your guys to to random locations where they suffocate and die, could be a great game in the future but right now unplayable.

Since I got ExoColony in early access in 2024, it has improved a lot, mostly in the important areas of balancing and performance. The game gets many things right imo, like a fairly realistic atmosphere mechanic, where every room has its own gas levels and pressure. The player needs to manage 5 different gases (ie oxygen with moss and later with tech, so that colonists don't suffocate or polution which the colony generates with industry). Each of the colonists after early game has a thought through life - kids are born, go to school, institute, academy, thus getting productivity boost, consuming fine food and goods, living in good houses to get even more productivity boost. Later the game lets you also terraform the planet you choose at the start of the playthrough. On the other hand, there still are some areas the devs could improve, like prolonging the life of colonists or adding variety to the profession management, which gets repetitive in the late game. All in all, it is a challenging survival game with enjoyable mechanics and rewarding gameplay.

I returned to the game now after full release and I must say the game has improved quite a lot in many aspects. It is now definitely easier to keep your colony running and you don't have to worry too much about digging too deep and suffocating. You also don't need to micromanage your colonists as much because they reassign themselves to the most important tasks quite well. In the end my attempt at terraforming the planet was successful and my colonists could finally see the sun again and breathe in the fresh air. Previous early access review: It is a good colony management game. It has a nice loop of recycling resources. Water becomes dirty. And you can clean it again. Same with many other resources. It took a bit of time to ensure that my colonists are able to survive. Mainly have enough oxygen. Aging plays a bigger role than you are normally used to in other games. Game definitely requires more micromanagement to ensure your colonist are doing what you want and you are not wasting resources that are needed elsewhere. Right now as long as you still have not too low pressure in your ship room and have some frozen colonists left you can rebuild even when you got 0 colonists alive and 0 food which is not really possible in many games. Bug I encountered when loading a saved game was swiftly fixed by the developers.

This game is missing a decent tutorial. you out grow things way too quickly, you run out of power, you run out of food, you run out of water. everything leads to civs dying and you go crazy trying to recoup. and just when things are going well, you go through the circle again.

If you like complex colony sims where you need to think long-term, this is your game. Managing oxygen, food, and materials is tough but rewarding. The time progression system is cool, as you get to see generations of colonists grow old and new ones take their place. I would say it might be a bit challenging for casual players, but if you’re into deep management, you’ll love it. The tweaks done before full release fixed the biggest issues and so far it runs smoothly :)

If you like management challenge, it's game for you. I like the slow paced start with tutorial, but do not get fooled by it. You need to plan ahead. I failed quite hard on my first try :D All died on hunger. I need to focus more on what do to in the right time. But it was very captivating even tho I failed that bad. Back on start and now better... I hope. (Issues I had in the prerelease version seems to be all fixed)