Aven Colony

Grab it on sale and you'll absolutely get your money's worth. It's a fun a chill city builder (totally worth the $7 I paid), but it's also pretty short for the genre with limited replay value. Other noteable drawbacks:
-Lack of optimization. This 8 year old game will still start to stutter on a brand new, high end machine once your colony gets big enough.
-Buildings and features that feel useless outside of mission objectives.
-Elements that feel unfinished. The research tree is very limited and doesn't do anything to improve buildings (there's really no point in building wind farms without a way to improve their output and the resource loss from the laser mines more than negates their faster speed. The inability to improve the range or performance on any buildings is frustrating).
-The story feels like it's building a solid world and starting to go somewhere and then it just... ends.
All in all, it's fun for a few hours but ultimately feels half finished.

Just started and in the process of the training sessions and I have to say this game has got to have the very best instructional modules I've seen in a game for several decades of gaming. Incredible. And I know most games nowadays don't even come with a manual which is sad. I suppose I'm just an old school gamer from several years ago but this game is really fun and interesting. Hopefully I'll come back and give it an even better review but if you want a relaxing ambient break from other titles? This is a good choice. I only wish I had seen it when it was released back in 2017. Pick it up. I doubt you'll be disappointed at all.

I bought this on sale seven years after its initial release, so I am satisfied with my purchase. It lacks depth, and I'm not sure how replayable it will be (I have only played the campaigns), but it is a fun twist to city and colony builders. And I like the science-fiction element it brings to the genre. It doesn't rank amongst my favourites, but it is a nice addition to my city, colony, empire, etc. building game collection. I'd say it's a 6–7/10 for me.

Very good colony builder who prefer much more relax approach to it. All you have to worry about is food, energy and population morale.
Security is upheld by drones and colony defence handled by turrets and storm catchers.
I enjoyed this game very much and can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who's looking an entry game to colony/city sim.

Love the cartoony graphics and simplicity of controls with automation (e.g. click to apply to all chemical plants) features, although it could use more such automation features, especially when one has multiple such buildings :)

Aven Colony is not simply about producing goods for the population, but there's also balancing of the workforce, managing food and air quality, optimizing commuting distance, and building up defenses to fight invading aliens.
At first I didn't like how the productivity of farms depends on the location, but later I started to enjoy finding the spot with the highest productivity for each crop, and changing the crop to see which one fits best for that spot.
The campaign consists of 9 missions and is very well designed. Each map has its own unique challenges. For example, there is an icy cold mission where you have to expand quickly to a more fertile area far away from the base, using food rations to keep the workers fed. And keep in mind that whenever food or water is low, the colony quickly snowballs to mass extinction, as people get angry about shortages and stop working (even the farmers themselves!) leading to more shortages.
The biggest downside of this game is lack of optimization. The game stutters above 300 buildings, so forget about building large colonies. (The problem seems to be that the game loads transparency for every building whenever you build something.)
A smaller issue is that the overworld map side missions are a bit boring. But you can easily assign them all back to back to a ship by holding SHIFT and right clicking. On the overworld map, you can also build extra colonies that produce solar energy for example. But there's no extra playable area as you may think at first.
All in all, not a perfect city builder, but definitely more fun than I expected, seeing how cheap it gets on sale.

I absolutely love this game, it's super fun and I think it's well executed. It reminds me vaguely of GoodGame Galaxy and Galaxy Life from my childhood. 10/10, would 100% recommend.