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.

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 :)

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.

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 purchased this game as it is a space based colony builder and the graphics looked pretty. I had been looking for a game similar to my favourite game "Space Colony" by Firefly studios. I looked around and people said this is similar. I can agree, it is quite close to it since we try to survive on the planet with limited resources etc. Where it differs is we don't manage individual colonists (positive: no need for micromanagement at colonist level, negative: individual colonists don't matter at all, and I found myself unbothered if they were suffering). I also wished there would be combat (like aliens attacking you since you are on their planet, or other companies competing for resources or glory). I have only played a few missions so far, so maybe there will be something like it in the future, but from other comments I infer there is no combat.
Here is what I liked about this game:
1. It is a colony builder in space. - nice
2. The graphics are pretty nice (full 3D, you can rotate the camera in any direction) - very nice
3. There are plenty of resources, building types and missions to keep you occupied - nice
4. The DEMO is very good, and really helps you get started - very cool
5. The music is pleasant
6. The devs seem to be active
What I dislike:
1. The colonists' dialogues are confusing and there is no information anywhere. Add to that, it seems these dialogues have no connection with game play??? Examples:
1.1 My colonists kept complaining about a dead body for a while and then stopped. I couldn't do anything as I was unsure where the dead body came from? Maybe a colonist got old and died but I don't know. Maybe the dialogues are just fillers, in which case I would like some wiki or so which says not to worry for this?
1.2 Occasionally my colonist says "What am I seeing, I will close my eyes and hope it disappears". No please tell me, WHAT are you seeing? Just hearing the words doesn't help me decide what to do about this.
2. My PC has 8 GB ram and 2 GB graphics processor but it hangs occasionally (it is not too bad, just a few seconds here and there, but I thought if I have recommended settings my game shouldn't hang?)
3. It gets repetitive after a while. Once you figure out how to get a colony going, it's just a wait game, wait for enough nanites, or enough people or enough 1-2-3 and then you can do what you wanted to do. Not saying this is bad, it is relaxing in its own way, but some variety would be nice.
Neutral:
There are some aspects of the game I haven't explored yet, example the Plague Spores or the Creep Spores. I am curious to see what happens when they infect someone, so far they haven't because they just die from hits by my pew pew machine. . So I am not sure if the game is deeper than I think it is.
I also have not played on other difficulties other than Normal as I feel like it would just annoy me rather than make it fun (since so far I found it to be waiting game).
Final thoughts:
I am really enjoying this game. I will play more since I like it. It is a game of moderate depth, fun and no need to use brain too much. City builder in space! Very cool :)
But if the devs read this, please add alien fights to the game (if via DLC also okay). Just a suggestion, they can be similar to the alien fights in Space Colony from Firefly studios. That kind of combat will really fit well with this game.

I have now played this game on PS4 Xbox One and now steam and I would play it again on another system yea the air intake always being needed is an issue but its not game breaking and does not takeaway from the fun of the ride