Aven Colony asks you to keep a few hundred people alive on a planet that wants them dead. Mothership Entertainment built that premise into a city-builder for PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One in 2017, published by Team17. The pitch is simple: humanity’s first extrasolar settlement, built from tents to skyscrapers on an alien world called Aven Prime.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Aven Prime Has Deserts, Tundras and Jungles
The setting does the heavy lifting. Aven Prime sits light-years from Earth and offers deserts, tundras and jungles to build across. You land, you expand, and you turn a small colony into a sprawling city. New colonists arrive over time. The map is not a backdrop; it is the antagonist.
The Creep Eats Your Buildings
The dangers are specific and they are varied. Storms roll through. Dust devils tear at the settlement. Toxic gas and shard storms follow. An alien growth called “the creep” spreads over buildings and wraps them in tentacles, and you need drones to clear it. Plague spores, hovering guardians and cultist airships attack the colony outright, which means defensive structures are not optional.
- Storms
- Dust devils
- Toxic gas
- Shard storms
- The creep
- Plague spores
- Hovering guardians
- Cultist airships
That list is the game’s real personality. Aven Colony is at its best when it is throwing weather and wildlife at a city you spent an hour arranging.
Night Freezes the Crops
The day and night cycle matters more than most builders bother to make it matter. During the night cycle everything freezes over. Food will not grow, and solar panels run at 50%. That single rule forces you to plan storage and power rather than react to a red icon. Research improves your crops, and there are over a dozen types to grow. Oxygen, housing, food cultivation, resource mining and expansion all sit on the same grid.
Drones Do Everything
Flying drones build, upgrade, recycle and manage the colony. Colonists walk or drive hover cars. The camera sits in a bird’s-eye isometric view, which suits a game about laying pipe and spacing buildings. It is single-player only, and it is a simulator, a strategy game and an indie release at once. The genre label undersells how much of the loop is logistics.
Morale Decides Whether You Keep Your Job
The morale system is the sharpest idea in Aven Colony. Food, living conditions, employment, crime and the social policies you set all push it up or down. Then the game does something harsher than most city-builders dare: regular elections are held, and citizens can sack you if morale falls too low. You are not a god. You are an administrator with a term limit.
Ancient Artefacts and Sub-Colonies
Expansion brings discoveries. Ancient alien artefacts turn up as the colony grows. Sub-colonies can be built. A space elevator is on the building list, along with tent-like structures and skyscrapers. The arc from canvas to orbital infrastructure is the whole fantasy, and Aven Colony mostly delivers it.
Where the Colony Stumbles
The pieces are all here, and that is also the problem. Aven Colony gathers storms, the creep, elections, crops, drones and artefacts into one package without any of them landing hard enough to define the game. The creep should be terrifying. Instead it reads as maintenance. The elections should feel like a reckoning. Instead they read as a meter you learn to watch. Mothership Entertainment built a competent colony sim and stopped short of a memorable one, and the 7.3/10 critic aggregate across seven outlets lands about right.
What holds it up is the night cycle. The freeze that stops food and halves solar output is the one rule that changes how you build rather than how you feel. That is the design worth stealing, and it is the reason to keep playing past the first colony.
Aven Colony is a solid, slightly overstuffed city-builder with a genuinely hostile planet and one excellent constraint. It will not convert anyone who bounced off the genre, and it does not try to. For players who want survival pressure layered onto grid management, the colony is worth founding.
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