Spoilers below.

This game wasn't half bad, until the defense missions started. With no direction other than "place some turrets" I spread them evenly around the map. Then enemy drop ships landed, and my turrets shot at them. The turrets completely missed their target, but they had no problem mowing down my entire colony with friendly fire (which I was given no warning to watch out for). It took hours to build, and only seconds to destroy. By the time I realized what was happening and thought to take control of my turrets, it was too late - I had too many turrets, and the whole colony is made of tissue paper.

It was a real grind to build everything up to the point I'd gotten to. Even if I reloaded my last save, I'd have to figure out how to place turrets to avoid crossfire and also manually control them for every attack. It's just too tedious. I'm honestly not sure how anyone could get through this poor design without saintly patience.

Do I recommend this game? Solid No.

Buyer Beware game is ABANDONED!!!

Your structures constantly decay, so you must have lots of mechanics to keep everything repaired. However the biggest issue for me was pathing. The mechanics kept getting stuck, so my structures didn't get repaired and were destroyed. Reading the forums, this has been an issue since summer 2016. You can eventually make miners, scientists and utility vehicles, but what's the point, since they're all going ot get stuck anyway, making the game even more unplayable.

I spent most of my game time building the items needed to train mechanics, you never have enough. Having to have 2 mechanics per structure is ridiculous, they're slow and take forever to get anywhere (providing you don't have a traffic jam somewhere (pathing!!!!)).

Oddly the habitats all connect, but the mechanics can't pass thru them, but rather have to go around them, causing more delays. They tend to lock in place, so you must build them all over the place instead.

This game needs a grid so you don't place buildings too close together causing even more pathing issues.

Seems to me the most useless building is the launch pad, you don't make any money, so then why would you want to sell anything??

Until atleast the pathing is fixed I highly recommend for you to stay away from this game unless you want a lesson in frustration and a lot of wasted gameplay.

Update 6/16/2017:
Last update was in Sept 2016 adding an overhead view and 3 languages, but no real update since it 's release from EA in July 2016.

Earth Space Colonies is a building outer world pods simulator. I recommend the game for the reason I was enjoying such things right from the Moonbase Commander (which is quite old now). But - I see some mishaps so far which is why not everyone happy about this project, so - I urge you to think before getting yourself into.

Generally, there you build some structures, and then build more. And more. Some of them are very basic for survival (giving your colonists energy, water, fresh air and so on). Other will be gathering materials for the further growing, and once you'll have enough - you get more structures to build (like bigger powerplant or even a factory to build stuff from another stuff). That's it! Build - wait to collect some materials - build further. There will be other tasks, like maintenance of your buildings in the unfriendly environment - but those elements are quite crude at moment. In theory, you can build military base, and even fight some foes there... But principally, it's about building and developing, and not raging wars. And that's a good feature! Too many games are theming bloodbaths now and too few - prosperity and well-being of the all humankind.

What I liked was the overall atmosphere, which returns us to the romantic novels, like Ray Bradbury used to write. You know, about blooming gardens on the Mars surface...

What I didn't liked is the lack of content - but the developer promises to make more. What I didn't like even more is the unfriendly interface. Considering the facts that your buildings wears off quite fast, you need to build new ones and hire maintenance stuff even faster, right? But to build new pods you'll need materials. Which of existing structures produces them - you'll learn only when click all of them. If you'll need more stuff later - again, you should manually find that specific building and make an order of producing. Even on the point, where you'll be managing dozens of materials, you'll be doing the very same basic moves by finding the producer, ordering him to do some work, and controlling all such producers... Jeez, I need "yellow pages" there!

In the bottom of the hud there are 5 special buttons to Destroy your colony. I'll not be arguing, that they can be of some use... yet I don't need them so often, even if I forget about Bradbury completely. I'd preferred to see on that place some other, much more useful elements, like special buttons for producing all aviable materials from one place!

To make a final statement, this is a building sandbox simulator, which is not quite good with the building so far... and considering its sandbox nature, not so much fun. Yet... it is still early access, so there is still hope. You know, of the better future. So far, it is just another indie game made by one man, where you need to tune with the developer's logic - like Zigfrak, for example. I'll mark it as 6/10. Certainly not a sleep-taker. Yet it deserves to be on Steam much more than many other scumming junk pieces, which people buying only for cards. As of price, though... Sol 0 is two times cheaper and delivering more fun at moment. Think, people.

This is a shame. I had high hopes for this one. The issue isn't it's early stage in development, it's the glaring lack of design work. The main thrust of the game is producing saleable products to fund your colony's growth. There is no support in the UI for this, however.

Each building is seperate, so you have to click on each building to view its status. Then for each unit of raw materials you want to produce, you have to click once per unit to add it to the production queue. There's no way to say "I want to produce these until I say otherwise"; you just have to click hundreds of times. And if it finishes, then you don't get a notification, so make sure you click more times than you need, or resign yourself to checking back periodically. Then, you have to click each manufacturing building to view its status, and if it's not currently manufacturing, you can tell it to produce one manufactured item. No queue there, so just remember to check each factory periodically to see if it's finished with its one item. Then to sell the items, you go into that building and click once for each item you want to sell. If you want to sell fifty units, that's fifty clicks. If you think all that sounds pretty tedious, you'd be right.

That the game has reached a playable state with no thought given to how it's going to be played makes me very doubtful that the game will ever fully mature. I'd love to be proven wrong. I am not going to hold my breath, however.

For those of you who enjoy resource games like Banished or Planet Base this is the game for you. It posseses many of the same features but taken to the next level. The layers of crafting are farily intricate. In addition you have the added dimension of a research tree and the problem of managing 3 colonies at a time where each colony is interdependant on the others. Throw that together with the threat of robbers and aliens and you have a game that will keep you entertained for hours. At the beginning of the game you have "advisors" they do a great job at stepping you through some of the beginning phases but the mechanics are designed where you need to be increasingly more creative. This system allows you to jump right into playing the game with a very easy learning curve. If you don't want to be constrained by the story they also have a sandbox mode. All in all I think this is the best resource game I have played. I think it better even then banished or planet base. One last thing the price point on this game is well worth it. Buy it you'll love it.

I'm super bummed. This game has a lot of potential, but it's not a finished product at this point. Many basic game concepts have not implemented yet, and the players time quickly devolves into an unsustainable amount of micro-management. There's a strong imbalance between what the player must do manually and what is automated behind the scenes. For example:
- When building habitation structures, new colonists instantaneously fill the structures regardless of whether or not the colony even has the ability to accept deliveries (extreme and illogical automation)
- To construct a new building or object - of which there are many - each unit of material required for construction has to be manually produced by the player (extreme and illogical micromanagement).

I hope development continues on this project. It has the foundation to go far.

I only paid 1.49 for this and I'm still considering asking for a refund.

Let me expound a bit...

This almost seems like someone had an idea for a decent Tapping Game on a mobile platform and then decided to turn it into a bare-bones PC port. This game, so far, seems to be nothing more than clicks. Want to make resources? Click to make one of ANYTHING, but you only get one per click, so if you want 40, click 40 times. Or you can just turn on automation and it will keep making things ad infinitum. There's no "process" to make anything. It's just clicks. You don't have to send out astronauts to mine ore, you don't have to extract anything from the soil. Well, maybe you do theoretically, but if you want to go that route, it's all in your imagination.

Want to build the more complicated buildings? Just wait til the automated counters tick up and build one when you have enough supplies.

I'm renaming this Earth Space Colonies: Click and Wait.

Let's colonize Mars...and beyond!
On start there is very helpful tutorial which introduces you to the basics of gameplay.
Easy and fun gameplay with a lot resource-personnel management and building maintenance.
And while your base growing slowly,notice that you have spent hours playing.
For Early Access, good enough.

My dream had always been traveling to space or another planet. This game is future-looking, since one day we will really colonize Mars. I was very excited to play it and it really worth it!
It all looks so real and you even have research projects and different buildings. The effects are really nice and you can actually have grass on Mars!
I would recommend it, especially for space-lovers!

Earth Space Colonies is a space colony management game developed and published by Persona and Pixel Studio. The game itself is similar to Planetbase and Sol 0: Mars Colonization. At first glance Earth Space Colonies looked quite interesting to me since I haven’t really played a management game for quite a while, especially a space one. That said, I was somewhat drawn out due to the graphics because from the screenshots on the Steam Store page, it looked like a game for mobile devices but once I was inside the game, it wasn’t that bad and I grew fond of them after a while.

Right now the point of the game is pretty simple, even though, from what I’ve played I still couldn’t figure out if what I’ve gone through was part of the tutorial or if there was no tutorial at all. What I can say is that you always have atleast one objective given to you by one or more of the game’s characters and that is one of things that interests me most in Earth Space Colonies. The fact that it has characters and a narrative driven story, which I assume is still being worked on. According to the developers, the game will have three different campaigns and I only played one of them.

Pros:

• The game runs pretty smooth, atleast for me. (over 200 FPS ingame with 970/ i5 3.2Ghz)
  
• Nice music, and even though it gets repetitive, I still find myself enjoying it.
  
• Huge variety of craftable items and resources
  
• Sense of progression, not usually found in this type of games

Cons:

• Buggy and clunky AI (technicians tend to get stuck on buildings or in thin air)
  
• The UI is somewhat confusing and unintuitive at all, it could use a complete overhaul
  
• The pace of the game tends to stagnate when you’re waiting for a research to complete or resources to be reproduced
  
• Lack of radar/map which indicates damaged buildings

Overall thoughts

After around four hours of gameplay, I still have mixed feelings about Earth Space Colonies but I can say for sure that the game has the potential to become a very good game. But, right now I feel like it still needs some work, optimizing the AI and polishing the interface, because I can imagine some people would get somewhat confused while playing it at the moment since it can be somewhat unintuitive.

That said, I do think the game might be worth your time if you’re into space exploration or if you’re just a fan of management games in general with a little bit of micromanagement thrown into the mix . The three different campaigns make the overall game much more interesting Since each one of them focuses on different aspects, “Terraform Mars, defend Ceres, explore Ganymede.” Unlike other games from this genre, in Earth Space Colonies you always have some sort of guidance throughout the game, the objectives. These help you progress not only on game mechanics and unlocking new craftable items and resources but also allow you to progress through the story.

So, if you like what I mentioned and if the game interests you, I say go for it. It seems the developers are currently working on the pathfinding AI and hopefully, soon enough, all campaigns will be complete.