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.

It is OK. I would give it a 70 to 75
it is a little long in the tooth
But considering its age, I think it is a challenging, mission driven game that is pretty balanced.
Compared to something like Planetbase, this game is a bit more clicky, in that you have to stay on top of a lot of things. Almost micromanagement, mostly because there is no auto repair on the buildings. But getting production, lifestyle, research, and survival balance it tricky and it changes over time and based on the environment.
Some regions are mineral poor so you have to go agrarian and trade for metals, other places are arctic, so you trade metals and energy for food...
Very good management game, not great, but very good.

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.

TL;DR: If you like colony-builders, then I expect you'd like this.
It's a city-builder. More correctly, it's a colony-builder. The game takes place on an alien world. You're not going to be building a metropolis like you would in, say, Sim City. I don't recall ever developing for more than about 1,500 people during the campaign, and it was often much less than that. This was all during the campaign, and I have not played maps outside of the campaign yet; I suppose you could potentially develop for maybe 5-6k people but this is pure speculation on my part.
My only real complaint is the length of the campaign. I felt there could have been at least a few more levels. There are maps that you can play that are not part of the campaign.
The campaign itself was fun, albeit rather difficult at times. It seemed like after the first level or two, the game basically tested your ability to develop a colony while being unable to work with certain aspects. For example, one of the maps has it so you can't produce earth crops, only the alien crops, which makes food production much more difficult. It should be noted that alien crops can be used in food production to an extent, but unlike earth crops this requires extra infrastructure.
There are several difficulty settings. I completed the campaign on Normal. One of the achievements, of which I've earned them all, calls for completing one of the campaign levels on the highest difficulty. It was difficult, but I don't think it was unreasonably difficult.
There's no actual military aspect to speak of. However, you can build cannons to protect your structures and people from various hazards.
Each campaign level calls for a certain number of objectives to be completed. It is possible to complete these out of order and get credit for them. I found it's not always a good idea to do the current displayed objective, but your mileage may vary.
An in-game tutorial is available and I recommend developing an understanding of what it has to offer before commencing with the campaign.

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 :)