Pretty shallow. (review/feedback)

[Avallac]

Played the review version on my friends laptop, after about 4-5 missions you've already done everything and built everything and its really same thing over and over.
1. There is only 1 farm building you would ever use, that being the greenhouse. Regular farms are 100% pointless and if you want them to be less useless you have to micro them every winter to lower population priority and they will still keep a couple colonists busy even on lowest priority doing nothing. No reason what so ever to use them, greenhouses work perfectly.
2. Same goes for power, you will only ever need geothermal and if you're still lacking power, whatever geothermal access you have will be enough to reach zorium and maybe you'd need to build 1 zorium gen end game, thats about it. No point wasting time with solar or wind. Solar again adds a load of pointless micro, if you want it to be efficient you have to stock up on energy using batteries, make sure you have enough to last through the winter, turn the batteries on when the deficit kicks in.. etc. Really not 1 reason to use either solar or wind. Plety of geothermal and zorium endgame, on top of it you will need to build lighting towers and those will keep your batteries full regardless (you'll likely use them once or twice the whole game due to abundance of energy from geo/zorium)
3. Trade is a waste of time, 200 melons for 220 rice? Ok, with the amount of pop/energy/nanites it takes to build that crap and then haul all of those resources, you could have built 2 greenhouses and farmed up a few thouthand of each item. You can't trade for anything useful like nanites/iron, all you can do is give those away which will never be worthwhile. There are some singular contracts where you can get rid of some ehnancers and get again a few hundred melons for it, but those are 1 time and again pointless.
4. 3 farms producing diff basic foods is more than enough to keep your colony happy, no reason to ever use the mill, aside from some mission completion objectives, which are the only reasons you will ever build wind/regular farm/solar/trade/etc.
5. No reason to use enhancers that you can produce with chemical factory/alien crops. Your colony will be sufficiently happy with just enough water, food (some melons/rice/barley), clean air, hospital, bar, maybe throw in another happiness building even though there seems to be no reason to have high happiness aside from roleplay.
6. "events" such as ice shars, creep invasions and plague spores (+occasional worm on some maps) are very uninteresting and are literally as fun as some weather effects. Creeps? Just build an anti creep building to cover your base, thats it, done, forget about it. Kinda like a police station. Plague? Just have a hospital, science (for chemical) and chemical plant (for vaccines) by mid - late game (very easy even on hard diff) and you're good. Chemical plant will only be usefull for nanomedicines and vaccines btw. Like I said earlier there is no reason to produce enhancers. - Shards? ignore them. Just repair some damaged buildings once in a long while and you're good. After mid game you will have a ton of resources for plasma turrets so just build those I guess, even though you don't need to. Worms? ok it spits some random balls of fire in random places, they do little damage and you can just repair it at some point. Maybe put a turret there, after a couple times worm will never show up again.
7. Reasearch/expeditons? Pretty useless aside from the building itself unlocking chem plants (medicine+vaccines). Sure you can reasearch some enhancers (for no reason). You can reasearch boosts the batteries can give, which you will never need. Can upgrade expedition ship. By the time you upgrade it even once you'll probably be done with the mission and its not like the expedition ship actually needs any upgrades, you can do all the little missions without them. Expeditions themselves are just you clicking on a map and it collects stuff, most of it usless. 1 extra colonist, some commendations (which don't give you anything) maybe some resources at some point (which you could have farmed better yourself with the manpower it takes to run expedition center) or some artifact. Yeah the articfact that can make your colony happy for 6 months (again you'll never need it) or give you some limited range shield against shards/spores which again you already have protection from by that point.
8. Dead/alive? The game is pretty dead. The only thing you'll even remotely care about is the rather limited story, but after a few missions there isn't enough of it to carry the same repetitive boring gameplay. Colonists are some number to fill slots in buildings that you'd never care about aside from some number in the happiness bar which again takes 1-2 clicks to fix.
9. Missions/victory objectives? Yea those are the only reason you will ever build half the buildings in the game or ever do expeditions and such. The story is ok overall but it was mostly there so you'd wake up here and there while playing.
10. Referendums? Its just a countdown to wether you have over 50% happiness or not at the end of the year, thats all. Maybe it will remind you that you forgot to build a police station. Mkay.

Anyway there is a bit more to cover but I'm tired of writing. The game is fun at first but you will very quickly exhaust what it has to offer and figure out the handful of useful buildings you'll need to build, then rinse and repeat. Not much else to it.

It feels like this is an unfinished RTS where the devs just haven't put the units and enemies in, perhaps if they did that it would have some more substance to it, otherwise really not worth the money or time after 15 hours in.

[CursedPanther]

Ok, now where can I read up on the professional reviews?

[Kevin the Inkling]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Ok, now where can I read up on the professional reviews?

How come your a condending ass to everyone who has any critizism? And considering the handling of the release. I tend to believe the OP may not be far from the truth.

[CursedPanther]

Originally posted by Merku:

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Ok, now where can I read up on the professional reviews?

How come your a condending ass to everyone who has any critizism? And considering the handling of the release. I tend to believe the OP may not be far from the truth.

Both of you are free to leave. Like anyone will care.

[Kevin the Inkling]

First of all the OP posted a detailed review. It was pretty damn well writen too considering the norm. And he explained each and every flaw rather then. "Game is bad bro!"

I've critized the handling of the release date. If anyone needs to leave it is you. Even in the vain of deffending the game your likely to drive more away and towards refund then either me or the OP could.

Not only that but your conduct could be considered harassment to say the least.

[Godzilla Rose]

Aw man that sucks. I'll try it out for an hour or two and if not have to refind it. I was hoping this would be a sim with a ton of depth to dig into for a long time.

[Kevin the Inkling]

Originally posted by Gaunter O'dimm:

Aw man that sucks. I'll try it out for an hour or two and if not have to refind it. I was hoping this would be a sim with a ton of depth to dig into for a long time.

I'll be givening a try to healthy skeptism. But yeah I'll keep the review in mind. Buildings existing for the sake of existing is pretty sloopy design if true.

[CursedPanther]

Originally posted by Merku:

First of all the OP posted a detailed review. It was pretty damn well writen too considering the norm. And he explained each and every flaw rather then. "Game is bad bro!"

I've critized the handling of the release date. If anyone needs to leave it is you. Even in the vain of deffending the game your likely to drive more away and towards refund then either me or the OP could.

Not only that but your conduct could be considered harassment to say the least.

No, OP posted a huge page of whining.

Professional reviews, despite it shows a negative tone towards the product in question and attempts to dig out all the flaws in it, will try to point at least some redeeming qualities. That is clearly not what the OP is remotely doing at all.

As for your silly complaint of the release date, your reasoning has been refuted already.

[Kevin the Inkling]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Originally posted by Merku:

First of all the OP posted a detailed review. It was pretty damn well writen too considering the norm. And he explained each and every flaw rather then. "Game is bad bro!"

I've critized the handling of the release date. If anyone needs to leave it is you. Even in the vain of deffending the game your likely to drive more away and towards refund then either me or the OP could.

Not only that but your conduct could be considered harassment to say the least.

No, OP posted a huge page of whining.

Professional reviews, despite it shows a negative tone towards the product in question and attempts to dig out all the flaws in it, will try to point at least some redeeming qualities. That is clearly not what the OP is remotely doing at all.

As for your silly complaint of the release date, your reasoning has been refuted already.

Dude your calling everyone on the forums who critizes the game or the company in anyway a twit and generally being a ♥♥♥♥ to people.

The OP explained how several of the buildings are pointless in that they're offer no benifit to offset the additional work. IE Tons of structures existing as a less efficenient or useful alternative to the base structure.

That's a fair complaint. And whining. How is the OP whining? By saying hey they have this problem here here and here.

By your definition any review that is negative is whining. If I decide to cancel my pre-order and get a refund it's more likely due to your shinnigans here CursePanther. Not this review.

If you do work for the devolpers I'd suggest they fire you since your attitude towards any and all critizing posts on this forum could be considered sabotage.

Also how cute your using a old C & C Soviet icon for an Avatar.

[Machin Shin]

from what i have seen in letsplays it really looks shallow and therefore i wait

[erfqfrqe]

The game looks good but this review made me hold off preordering. CursedPanther makes the forum pretty unwelcoming.

[CursedPanther]

See? If you don't join the hate bandwagon the moment it calls for arms and you get called a shill and 'makes it unwelcoming' these days.

No wonder the gaming community is always being looked down upon by the rest of the world.

[LupisVolk]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

See? If you don't join the hate bandwagon the moment it calls for arms and you get called a shill and 'makes it unwelcoming' these days.

No wonder the gaming community is always being looked down upon by the rest of the world.

Kinda have to agree with that. There's so much tribalism and bandwagoning that i'm surprised no anthropologist have tried to study the tribes of gamers.

There is so much hate leveled towards each other, why can't we all just have fun and play video games?

[LadyAquanine735]

I have several questions regarding this review.

1.) Did you really expect the game to be perfect? No game is perfect, not even popular, beloved ones. Ask any gamer who likes quality. They'll easily tell you that some game they like has as many flaws as it does good points.

2.) Did you even look around and enjoy the planet's beauty for what it was? This game is about more than just building. You're following a story (sometimes) or setting goals for yourself. If you zoom in, there's a lot going on that you're missing out on. There is more substance to it than just running around and shooting things, like most people do in games. This planet is much more realistic than a lot of planets shown in the sci-fi genre, and the developers worked hard on it.

3.) How many good city-building games have you actually played? It has been literally years since I saw a city-building game that was worth its salt in terms of gameplay, (and I have been playing city-building games since 2003). There have also hardly been any good ones within the sci-fi genre. Almost all take place on earth (or some other world) in an ancient or fantasy setting.

4.) As far as I can tell, you didn't play the whole game, and I mean the whole game. There are many things you just passed over because you wanted all the good stuff up front. This is not one of those games, and I'm sorry you don't see it that way. You sound like one of those overindulged gamers that burns through the newest MMO before it ever has a chance to get better, and then whine about having nothing to do later on before going off to the next game. If that's how you're going to approach "Aven Colony" it's not really the game for you. Not everyone is going to have the tunnel vision you do for it.

5.) Expeditions are some of the most interesting parts of the game. You obviously didn't build the exploration vessel and send people out to check out the planet, or you would have found some interesting stuff out there. That's what being a pioneer (even one on another planet) is all about. Exploring and finding new things. If our ancestors in America had had the same ungrateful attitude you did, we would have never settled the west, or discovered the amazing things Earth has to offer.

6.) The point behind some of the buildings, such as farms or solar panels is, you're not always gonna have the nanites to build big, expensive things like Zorium Plants, or stadiums, or plasma turrets. The lesser buildings are there to compensate for what you do not have, and are a step in the right direction for the city you will build in the future. Development is not about taking off and flying before you can even crawl, walk, or run. Sorry, but the game is realistic in this manner. You obviously don't like taking things slow.

7.) Enhancers (much as I dislike mind-altering drugs of any kind) do actually help somewhat in the game. Some of them make the people less inclined to violence, and therefore, less crimes. Others make the people happier without side-effects. The Chemical Plants also can produce things like Kelko Sludge, which is important on one of the maps, because you're not always gonna have iron or copper to mine to make nanites. It's a slower process, but at least you're not SOL (s---- outta luck) when the mines are exhausted. The enhancers are also useful in trade. I know you don't appreciate trade, but sometimes it's the only way to get certain things on certain maps (usually within the story).

8.) Mills give you the ability to make foods that would otherwise not be available or edible for the colonists. Wheat, for example (and this is true in real life) cannot just be plucked out of a field and eaten raw. You have to use a mill to turn it into flour, and that can be used in a number of foods in this game, including two alien dishes that the colonists will eat. The mill also allows you to make foods from alien plants that would otherwise be inedible for colonists, therefore broadening the food supply. The Tier 2 mill makes some cool stuff too, like little house robots and holographic gadgets the colonists can buy at retail centers. This and the processed foods all contribute to colonists' happiness and health.

9.) Yes, there is repetition in building certain buildings, but at least by then you know what you need, and you can play around with how you build. You can also zoom in and look at some of the details, see things you normally can't see from a distance. You can also explore the map using your virtual camera, as well as using the resource button to find new mineral deposits.

Obviously this game is not for you, and I resent you tearing it down because it doesn't meet your expectations. If you do not like the game, don't play it and go find something else to amuse yourself. You have that privilege. Some people will actually like this game, and chances are, they are not people that would get along with you in real life. So do us all a favor and leave.

[Davidklk]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Ok, now where can I read up on the professional reviews?

Here you go:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/07/25/aven-colony-review/

[CursedPanther]

Originally posted by Davidklk:

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Ok, now where can I read up on the professional reviews?

Here you go:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/07/25/aven-colony-review/

Thank you. Now this is what a proper review should be.