Project AURA

ABANDONWARE Don't mix high complexity with a bad UI.

Game was abandoned, as per this post from developers: https://steamcommunity.com/app/305940/discussions/0/3002173313616732353/ Store page shows banner proclaiming: "NEW UPDATE AVAILABLE; VERSION 1.1" Version 1.1 was released May 31, 2018

Nice idea, but still very alpha. - Campaigns can't be saved. - Very complex gameplay - There is only 1 campaign available. So, after getting known how it works, the game is already over... :-( Whenever the game is final, please let me know.

If you tasked a very smart person to make a colony/ builder/ with some Civ flavor into a deep functional game, and described how each game looks, sounds and feels in great detail to them. But they have never seen any of those games, and said "Eh, just wing it. It will be fine", you have AURA. I want so badly to find its redeeming features but its UI and interactions... it feels like driving a car, but from a chair duct taped on the roof with broom sticks and rope to run the controls. The building system took a fresh idea, and made it feel aggravating and disappointing to understand. That alone was impressive. Having to right click buildings twice to select them. Its a chore to even interact with anything. I want to have a good time playing this and leave a better review, but it is what it is, a disappointment. They have put years into this game, I hope they keep going and all the negative reviews reconsider. There are the parts of an amazing game here, the puzzle pieces don't fit together yet

SUMMARY: This is game is two things. It is really good and perhaps incredibly underrated. It is also a very niche experience that requires a certain amount of effort to learn. This is resource management boiled down to its most central component; controlling how much is produced versus consumed to assure the colony can sustain itself and continue expansion. NARRATIVE-COMPETENT: There story is bare-bones and only enough to give some explanation to this universe, with most flavor text being instructional, rather than exploratory. However, it is by no means the focus, and the universe is so simple that you can figure out what is going on fairly easily. ASCETIC-ENGAGING: Despite how trite the narrative and world building is, the way this game looks, both in the UI and in the overworld has a unique and surprisingly interesting look. Nothing groundbreaking per say, but enough to get be to always look at the buildings. MECHANICS-ENGAGING: This is a resource management game in its purest form. There are barely any other mechanics to speak of. That being said, this game executes this EXTREMELY well. Despite this simple premise, production chains are long enough, difficulty is high enough, and there is enough replay value to get your money's worth. LEGACY-UNKNOWN: This game is indie title without even a real cult following, probably due to its strong niche appeal. SUMMARY-7/10: If you want a city building game that is only about managing the production and consumption of a truly wide variety of resources and almost nothing else, this is the game for you. If you need something with a wider variety of mechanics, you should look somewhere else.

interesting idea but didnt really seem to go anywhere. for me anyway, i like to build a city in a city builder, and here you're just filling up already existing slots. its more a management puzzle sim where you need to find the ideal setup, and it took me about 6 hours to figure out that nothing else was coming beyond what i'd already seen.

Abandonware.

its a decent enough game for what it is but i cant recommend buying it as it was never finished

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Take any dictionary, look up the word [h1]disappointment[/h1] and you will be redirected to this game's Steam shop page. [list] [*]Graphics look fine. [*]It does seem to have a decent complexity, once you wrap your head around it, but… [*]… what keeps you from that, however, is the very badly explained tutorial. The challenge should come from mastering the game or from campaign goals – not from trying to learn the basics from incomplete commands in sometimes incorrect English. [*]The UI is even worse: It's tiny without an option to adjust that. The windows just pile on top of each other cluttering the screen when you have to drag and drop stuff between windows and the play area – the devs basically dismissed this problem by gatekeeping "playing it on full HD", which is a di[b][/b]ck move, since a lot of people don't have the option to do that. I get it: They had a vision - but dismissing and shaming your player base is not how you get your product to be appreciated... [*]Last but not least: The unrealistic climate collapse scenario it plays in is just pure cringe. [/list] These glaring issues and some others kept me from enjoying it enough to try it for more than one hour, before I had not sh[b][/b]its to give anymore and left. I got it for -80%, but I've still refunded it, because this game is abandoned and didn't get any updates in a looong time, despite several issues from Early Access present – that, as I already said, seem to be there on purpose and turn this game from an interesting project in a scam.