Review - Aven Colony
Humanity has taken to the stars and now it is your job to build a colony that will sustain them. Aven Colony is the latest game from the publisher, Team17. It is a city-builder game that follows the general style of the Tropico games. While the concept of a sci-fi city-builder seems good on the outset, there are many issues that stop Aven Colony from seriously engaging the player.
First let’s look at the gameplay. Aven Colony focuses on resource based gameplay as opposed to some of the layout based gameplay that can be seen in games like Sim City and Cities: Skylines. The player manages food, water, and energy to sustain their many colonists. Basic resources such as iron or wheat can be further processed into secondary goods that may then be used to produce even more valuable items. In this way, the resource management of Aven Colony mirrors the systems that can be seen in the Tropico series. Outside of the colony building, there are threats that have to be dealt with such as giant worms, alien drones, and sickness. There are also external expeditions that the player can send a craft to to get extra resources.
The greatest fault of this game is the direction of the gameplay. On the face of it it would make sense to follow in the path of Tropico. It was a quite successful series in it’s own right. However, Aven Colony suffers from a lack of depth to its resource creation. Most of the resource that can be created are food and drugs. Only three or four varieties of food are ever necessary to not only keep the colony fed, but also keep them happy about the variety. This leads the player to build the infrastructure necessary to sustain the colony early on, while later creation only repeats the systems that have already been built. Non-food resources are even more shallow. There is very little to build outside of the basic resource necessary to create buildings.
Such an issue could have been avoided in one of two ways. One would be to deepen the creation tree. With so little to produce and so few items necessitating secondary goods, there isn’t much infrastructure necessary for any good. A more complex and interdependent system would have made the gameplay far more engaging. However, what would have been much better would have been an implementation of an actual road system. In Aven Colony there are tunnels that people can move through. Every structure needs to have tunnels connected to it in order to prevent colonist unhappiness, but there is no other gameplay value to the tunnels. This was a lost opportunity to have resources and colonists physically move through the tunnels with all of the traffic that would accompany that. Instead there is only the meaningless eye-candy of colonists wandering through the tunnels. This point cannot be understated. Cities: Skylines’ gameplay is almost exclusively building efficient road-systems and it succeeded at being amazingly engaging. A similar concept can be seen in Factorio. Actual traffic and transport of resources would have made up for Aven Colony’s lack of resource depth.
There isn’t really anything else terribly engaging about Aven Colony’s gameplay. In the beginning of a colony there will be some minor struggles to start the colony off, but mid to late game is stale and repetitive. Honestly, the same issue appeared during my time with Tropico 4. This style of city-builder often finds itself becoming stale after the short initial struggle to survive. Tropico could sustain itself a bit longer as it has a much larger variety of buildings then Aven Colony, but they both die off in the end. The expeditions that Aven Colony presented seemed as though they would fix the late game issues initially. Once an expedition center is built, the player can send an expedition craft to do various missions throughout a larger world map. The problem is that there is no depth to this system. All that the player does is tell the ship to do the mission and everything else occurs off screen. With either mechanics for the player to engage in the missions or even the ability to found a system of colonies, greater depth could have come out of the expeditions. As is, these are just another task for the player to mindlessly deal with.
Enough of the gameplay, what about the themes of the game? Aven Colony has a strong element of human versus nature all throughout its gameplay. The deadly nature of the world, the air being deadly, necessitates that the colonists build a colony that at once isolates them from the natural and pushes out the alien. This trend follows throughout gameplay. The natural elements that the colony interacts with, such as the creep spores or the geothermal vents, all fall into two categories: threats and dominators. The dominators are what are useful to the colony. They are exploited, at the cost of the natural environ, in order to benefit the colony. With no benefits to sustaining the natural environment of the planet, a “good” landscape becomes one that is fully human and thereby unnatural. Any natural resource that cannot be used is then a threat that must be destroyed. The worms, creep spores, and diseases exist for no other purpose than to destroy the human colony. This duality is not a new one, in fact it is hundreds of years old. What I have described is the framework of colonialism. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Aven Colony fits beautifully into the mold of old-world colonialism with the technologically advanced colonizers coming in to tame the natural elements while making a tidy profit.
What is problematic is the lack of any modern nuance to the colonial theme. As I mentioned, there is no benefit to not using and taking everything on the map. There is no concept of pollution or damage for overusing land. In fact, the most advanced energy source is called a zorium generator and it happens to be the only building that spouts fire and smoke out of it. Aven Colony incentivizes the ransacking of natural resources that has shown to be both destructive and unsustainable in our own world. What this really shows is a lack of thought on the part of the developers regarding the themes inherent in their game. They followed the standard, cookie-cutter path to building a resource based city-builder. It worked in Tropico due to both the time-period and the tongue-and-cheek political satire inherent in the game, but it makes no sense that there is no consideration for natural elements in a game set in a far future civilization.
Overall, Aven Colony was quite a disappointment to me. It has shallow gameplay that only sustains itself over the early game. The lack of buildings, lack of resource depth, and ease of maintaining colonist happiness all made the game rather boring to play. The themes inherent in the gameplay were not thought out. They follow a standard colonial domination theme that does not fit the setting and only exists due to a cookie-cutter method of building the gameplay. While the game looks nice, there is not much to it overall. If you are really hankering for a new game like Tropico, then I guess that you can try this out. Really, there’s nothing special in this piece and you won’t miss much be passing it by.
Comments
Post a Comment