The default difficulty is set to Normal and for the most part the difficulty is pitched to give you a fairly relaxing and stress free time. Furthermore, you can use the bumper buttons to zoom in or out to get a bird’s eye view of your colony. The only criticism I do have is that the camera is really fiddly and feels counter intuitive at times with the left stick moving the camera around the map and the right stick controlling the lateral and vertical movements. The controls are fiddly at first with seemingly a lot of functions mapped across the various buttons, but the menu system is well set up and you can pause the game at any point to set up a chain of commands to start when you increase the game speed again.
These interjections into the campaign are a little cheesy and underdeveloped, but do help to give you some sense of purpose and meaning to what you are doing.Ĭity Builders work best on PC with the greater flexibility for multiple controls, however Mothership has done an excellent job of designing a system that works well on controller. Interspersed with the loose objectives you are given in each area are voice communications that flesh out the story a little more. The third mission is in a frozen wasteland where no crops grow, so you must build the colony based on trade with the other colonies. Your task in Sandy Gulch is to build a mining colony that serves the other colonies in terms of mineral resources and provides a base for expeditions to search the planet further.
Prove yourself in that terrain and you will be asked to move to Sandy Gulch, a dry, arid place with very limited fertile land and even more limited water. Your first mission sees you just establishing a colony in a rich, fertile area. There is a loose structure to the campaign to explain why you are moving around. The emphasis is very much on survival rather than pretty town planning, but as you progress into the campaign you will need to deploy some forward thinking in terms of maximising the natural resources available to you in order to make your colony a success. Each mission gradually increases the difficulty levels with restrictions on space for placing buildings, or environmental restrictions in terms of the viability of the land for crops and the abundance of water. Campaign mode is slightly different, with several missions spread across the various locations on the planet. Sandbox allows you to set a number of parameters to increase or decrease the difficulty of the level, but otherwise you are left to your own devices to plan and build how you see fit. You can choose to play in Campaign or Sandbox mode. Pitched as the last great frontier for humankind to conqueror you are part of a larger effort to build a sustainable home for the people aboard a huge colony ship. Aven Colony sees you installed as Governor tasked with building a human colony on an often hostile alien planet called Aven Prime.