Having once seemed on the verge of extinction, the city building genre is flourishing once more, not just on PC but on console as well. Between Cities: Skylines, Surviving Mars, Tropico 6 and Aven Colony, gamers are soon to be spoiled for choice in the near future, with games that cater to various different styles and sizes of city building.
Coming from Mothership Entertainment, Aven Colony spirits you away to an alien planet many light years away from Earth, putting you in charge of a burgeoning human colony. Starting from the humblest of beginnings, it’s up to you to build up the basic infrastructure before pushing on to create a truly functioning and somewhat more independent city.
The heart of your colony, right from the very off, is the construction drone facility. It’s from here that your handful of worker bees fly out to construct the various other buildings that you want, bringing them into existence with a resource known as nanites that are produced from various metallic ores that you mine.
However, you’re also juggling all of the necessary resources for human life. You need habitation, a source of clean and filtered air, water, food, power, and a few sources of entertainment wouldn’t go amiss either. That’s a lot to keep track of and juggle, made all the more complicated when considering that farms can grow around a dozen different crops, that you need storage space, can produce other products from the right resources, not to mention scientific research and links back up to the colony ship in orbit.
Thankfully, managing all of this on console with a gamepad is actually fairly intuitive. Camera control is on the two analogue sticks, while construction is handled on a square grid, with you simply having to bolt buildings down alongside each other and use “tunnels” to create a few thoroughfares for your citizens. Though there’s a lot of categories of building, they’re all kept in a relatively simple wheel menu, even if it’s easy to get a little lost trying to find what you’re looking for.
With so many different statistics and resources to keep track of, this could be an absolute nightmare. I’d still love for Mothership to find a way to display things a bit more intuitively – showing how a particular building impacts the overall colony could be handy – but having a string of glanceable info boxes along the bottom of the screen that can then be expanded upon with the D-pad is pretty simple. Map overlays then live in a menu accessed via the left trigger, letting you see things like the range of the construction drones, the suitability of land for farming, and a few other more visual details.
Of course, this being an alien world, there’s more than a few hazards to human life. Even within the safety of the habitat, the long cold nights and shifting seasons can seriously impact solar energy production, meaning you need to either invest in the less efficient wind turbines or build battery stores. Further to that, a number of hazards can sweep in, both environmental and from the alien life forms that live on the planet. Giant fireball spewing alien worms spring to mind… and suddenly it makes sense that you might have a plasma turret in the building menu.
Delving into the sandbox mode, it’s actually surprising how difficult the game becomes for a relatively inexperienced player. Where the first few story missions led me through the motions of setting up this building, that resource collection point, drawing water from the ground, and so on, sandbox mode takes away those crutches. You’re inundated with a series of objectives in the campaign, but the only one at the start of sandbox is to build up and get 50, then 100 colonists, and so on.
On my first attempt, I got to the point of thinking to myself, “Oh, I should build a mine and get some nanites”, only to discover that I’d foolishly rushed ahead and had no nanites to let me do so. My second attempt had me getting repeated warnings for various resource crises, whether the gradually sliding food or water levels, or the night time forcing various facilities to shut down through lack of power.
Certainly, a more competent and cautious approach might have been better, but there’s still hints of a more survivalist slant to the game. With that in the background of your construction, Aven Colony is looking like another great addition to the city builder genre, carving out its own niche on an alien world while showing that this genre can thrive just as well on console as it can on PC.
Paranoimia
The one I really want is Transport Fever.