"The Colony" is a really weak attempt to make a ripoff of games like Sapiens, Dwarf Fortress and so on, you know, declarative city builders where you declare what buildings you want and your workers go off and build, farm, mine, etc. Great genre, understandably popular, this is one of the worst of all games in that genre. If you can get it to load, it'll crash in minutes. Nothing is properly defined or fleshed out. A lot of things just don't work... it's an unfinished, bug riddled disaster.
Despite not being in Early Access, it's obvious this is an incomplete product. Developers have an obligation to deliver complete, not partially done products to gamers, that shouldn't be controversial. Whatever the excuses may be, it does no service to gamers for incomplete products polluting Steam like this. It makes it harder for gamers to find complete games, and it makes it harder for ethical developers who do the right thing to find their audience.
In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games.
This game is fairly dated at 8 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 5 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
I can't recommend this, it's not worth downloading even if it's "free". Games don't exist in a vacuum... Steam gamers have literally thousands of better choices.
