Aven Colony

This is a science fiction city building game with a relaxed pace. It's birds-eye view, and mostly involves placing and configuring buildings in a city. You spend some time in a zoomed out view outside your colony exploring with expedition ships and placing additional satellite colonies. There is an evolving story in the Campaign mode.

THE GOOD:

• Overall, the game is an easy, fun, and relaxing experience. There is only one really tense and difficult mission where you have a time limit.
• The evolving story for the Campaign mode is mildly interesting, although the ending is a bit cheesy and not particularly profound.
• Good tutorial design eases you into the game in a fun way. While it's not perfect, I had a few stumbling points and not everything was 100% clear, it was clear enough that I didn't have to look up anything online.
• There are no giant domes! A win for science realism.

THE BAD:

• The tutorial missions are maybe too long, and I started getting bored by the middle of the game. Fortunately, the later missions started getting more challenging with less hand-holding. I enjoyed the later missions quite a lot. So it was worth hanging in there and continuing.
• Referendums are very annoying. They are almost trivially easy to pass as I don't think my city ever had an approval rating of below 50%. Even with no effort you should stay above 60%. In spite of this, you get constantly harassed by pop-up messages over and over. I would have preferred if they notified me once and then just displayed an indicator thumbnail with the remaining time in the referendum and my approval rating.
• Artifacts are a poorly done addition to the game. You must place them before you know what they do and you can't move them afterward even though the placement might make them useless. In any case, none of them actually do anything useful because the game is quite easy.
• The outer colony exploration mode is really annoying. It leads to a ton of notifications and requires a lot of micromanagement that distracts you from the main game. There should be some kind of "attack move" you can use to have your ships automatically go to points of interest as they explore around.
• I wish you could manage notifications and decide whether they interrupt you, appear as thumbnails, or don't appear at all. As your colony gets larger dealing with notifications becomes a real drag.
• The colony is hermetically sealed... And yet when a geothermal fissure leaks poison gas outside the colony it somehow reduces the air quality inside the colony. How is that supposed to make sense?
• I'm supposed to believe that we need FIVE people to run a water pump in a sci-fi setting where cancer has been defeated and we can colonize other worlds. Water pumps were automated devices in the 1900s.
• The ideas on commuting are a bit weird in this game. People hate walking even short distances. Most strangely, people just hate to walk through a building to get to another building. I live in Montreal, where we have something called the Underground City where all you do is walk through buildings to get to other buildings and people love that here! It's a tourist attraction.
• When using a Mill, the "Share for All Mills" button is not intuitive. It's not clear that you should click the checkbox on the template mill first and then for any other mills you want to use that template.

THE UGLY:

• I encountered a game-breaking bug in the final mission that prevented me from winning the game. This was very disappointing. You have a task to find and use 4 artifacts, and for no reason I understand the game started the objective 25% complete. It might be because a defender bot attacked my colony directly, but it didn't leave me an artifact. So after I found only 3 artifacts the game moved on to the next objective—but I was now stuck! I was able to watch the ending on YouTube, but that's not good enough.
• There was a mention of a "zorium bomb" in the last mission. I auto-completed the mission and it didn't end up installing on my expedition ships.
• Buildings "ghost", becoming semi-transparent, when you place a new building. This is insane as it makes it really difficult to place new buildings. There is a game setting to remove this effect, but it doesn't even work.
• The indicators for your change in food or water over time are typically wrong and not very helpful.
• I once saw a construction drone take off east forever in a straight line, eventually plowing into a mountain and disappearing. It was pretty funny. I had to re-load for it to reappear and start working again.
• I've encountered several times a bug where deconstructing a passage tube fails. A drone sits there forever looking like it's deconstructing but doing nothing. Saving and reloading doesn't even fix this.