Maia
Been a year that I last wrote something about this game, and considering that the updates for the game come frequently, I think it’s time to update the review as well.
Last year I called it “playable”. This year I can actually call it entertaining. What’s most entertaining, at least for me, is that the colonists are actually very human. Allow me to explain.
In most games, you have people that feel more like worker drones. They will go from place to place, build, mine, craft, sleep, get hurt, go to the medic bay, build, mine, craft… The “people” here feel actually like people. And they don’t want to be treated like worker drones. They get stressed out if all they do is build and work.
– Real player with 101.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Management Games.
The inspirations for this game are both obvious and subtle, influencing how it looks, feels and plays, or rather how you think you should be playing it.
It swings from a low pace base builder with an enormously detailed simulation behind every little thing you see and can interact with to a frantic struggle for survival as the dangers of Maia strike the unprepared mercilessly. Prepare to be unprepared and learn by failing.
If you prefer to learn from the mistakes of others - or perhaps boast about your most successful survival or expansion tips and strategies, visit the official wiki and help it grow.
– Real player with 37.0 hrs in game
Aven Colony
Aven Colony, from Team 17, is a colony manager / city building / spinning-plates game where you need to juggle multiple responsibilities simultaneously. Some of the scenarios are interesting, if a bit contrived. But it may be a bit overwhelming for the un-prepared.
The colony ship still has a ton of people in orbit, and you need to establish a colony so you can get them down to the surface by juggling responsibilities such as power, housing, food, water, employment, crime, air quality, health, and morale.
– Real player with 63.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Base Building Games.
I bought this off humble bundle for around Au$10. Great deal. At the time I am writing this review, there are still two more days to get it at that price from humble.
I like city builder games that invite me to mellow with a glass of wine or cup of coffee while I ponder where to put my next building. This is exactly that type of game. It is playable on pause - the game will allow me to place buildings while it sits on pause and then I ramp up the speed while the buildings are building.
It’s a nice little compact game. It all happens in a very small screen space. After a day of playing Banished, I’m scrolling across screens and screens of farms and pastures looking for where my next buildings go. A day of playing Aven fits in a fraction of a screen.
– Real player with 56.9 hrs in game
Dungeon D14
Fun little toy. Not super deep and you only really play it once or twice, but for the price its good.
– Real player with 8.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Base Building Games.
needs more info. unplayable in current state. you will fail because of a resorce you didnt know you needed to make another requires the first, and a string of 3 more, however this is more info on that fact then the game will give you. playing you will have fun untill you grind to a halt because you didnt rush iron-steel bars-copper- copper bars-copper plates-microelectronics-gas-fuel cells, if you get behind you have lost, there is no coming back from one of these buildings losing power, your guys are best suited to doing one or at max two jobs as they run around like chickens with there heads cut off chasing invisible resorces. i lost 2 times one because i didnt understand my guys have ZERO controll minus telling them were to mine or build, not to mine or build. and a second time i microed my 2 chaines well and didnt figure out that coper plates/microelectronics were part of the power the building chain, lost because you cant make enough to power that chain with one building, meaning you somehow have to create extra energy or never build a building incorectly dont try for shoes or armor or anything cool it will ruin the power chain you have to run, taking the power grids away from the main chain will also resault in one or more of your buildings going unpowered, and they compeat for resorces with your units “life” bar battery thing, taking iron bars and a fair few people to make it. the food/ o2 system will almost never come into play if you take 1 min every half-hour of play to mine water/seaweed from the ground. this is the best tutorial for this game out there btw. cement=hard rocks , sand , water . steel bars= iron ore. coper plates= coper bars= coper ore. batteries=acid+steel bars. acid=sulfer. food=seaweed+water. o2=water. legit better than ingame id sugest if you get this get a notebook and wright it down, share it with the next chump afterwords.
– Real player with 3.7 hrs in game
Generation Nova
“They told us it was a foolproof method for interstellar travel."
How would you feel about waking up from cryo-sleep centuries too early on a huge space ship?
GENERATION NOVA is a strategy game of resource and colony management. The player has to balance the passengers needs and resources to keep the them alive and happy. Hopefully you will manage to build a community large enough so that one day the last generation on the ship will land on a habitable planet and start their new life on the ground. But don’t be too eager: Expand too fast and you might not have enough workforce to feed the children. Will you make the sacrifices needed to keep the voyage running or will the cold hull of the ship contain only corpses in the end?
The game takes inspiration from games like Banished, Rimworld and Frostpunk. Huge inspirations for the story and setting are from books Across the Universe and the Silo -series and the film Passengers.
Intuitive Building System
Build nearly two dozen different buildings that all serve a specific purpose inside the generation ship. Mine passing asteroids to create resources and tools to keep the generations growing. Keep the security and happiness up to pump up the working speed and hopefully lower the suicide rates.
Technology Upgrades
Assign passengers to conduct scientific research to gain upgrades in the passengers' and buildings' workflow. You don’t want to keep half of your population tilling the soil in the farms do you?
Dynamic Event And Task System
Choose your playstyle: Make harsh decisions and be a tyrant or be liberal and try to help as much as possible. In the end only thing that matters is that the generations will live on. Make the elders work or let them enjoy their last moments in life in peace. Encounter problems with material and resource malfunctions and order passengers to fix the issue even at the cost of their life or let the material go to waste.
Passenger AI
The passengers have been through a lot by just waking up in the ship. Social problems will eventually occur and everything will take a toll on their psyche. Manage their happiness and hope to keep the needed production lines going. You don’t want to end up with no tools to mine the asteroids. And you definitely don’t want the food to run out.
Interesting Zone System
Depending on where you are flying through the space the people of the ship might get more creative and faster in work. But pass a dark void or a nebula and the problems might start piling up. Hopefully the hull will not be breached in the asteroid field. Plan in advance to go on a resource production spree when you know the passengers are willing to do the extra work and give them the breaks they need when times seem the most dire.
Full Music Score
Over an hour of atmospheric and original music tracks made by Markus Brogaard.
“Home… This is our new home for now. Maybe one day my at least children will breath unfiltered air."
Terraformers: First Steps on Mars
Interesting theme, the graphics are simple but cool, the music is nice, it does run on GNU/Linux, but after eight hours of repetitive play, I wouldn’t call this a civ strategy kind of game, but more like a deck building card game, with lots of randomness, which gets you nowhere. You just need to be lucky to get the right cards at the right time for the right random spots to get a better score. No matter how good your planning is, there is too much luck involved. Maybe the 30 days span of a gameplay is too short for seeing the bigger picture, this is just a demo after all, but that’s my take on the current game. I do wish the devs good luck and I hope the final game offers a better experience.
– Real player with 8.8 hrs in game
A pretty solid board game
Game is very reminiscent of the popular board game Terraforming Mars, with some slight changes.
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Your starting hand is always the same 2 cards
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Beyond Oxygen, H2O and Temperature, there’s a nebulous “atmosphere” terraform setting
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Ever 10 years you select a leader, who has special abilities and traits that can be used on your turn
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Pop happiness is measured and scored.
Overall its fun for a few play throughs, but with the same 6 leaders, same starting hand, and hard 30 turn limit, you’ll only have fun for a bit.
– Real player with 4.1 hrs in game
Cliff Empire
It’s quite a decent game for $15. There is a lot of unlockable content in the mid to late game that the sheer scale of the world makes you think that you really got value for money. The game starts off slow but picks up the pace later so in the beginning expect to wait around a lot for your production to catch up with your construction needs.
At the start, you can get whatever you need from your great “supplier” in the sky as long as you have money but in the later part of the game, the “cheat” in production closes and you’ll start to need to produce everything by yourself. This slowly ramps up the difficulty. Expect to lose your first 3 or 4 games before you learn the mechanics of the game and it becomes easier, if you go in with preconceived notions of “how the game MUST work!!”, you are going to be in for a rough time. Remember to save a lot if you’re still learning if you don’t feel like restarting from the beginning often.
– Real player with 175.9 hrs in game
Wow. This game is my surprise packet of the last 5 years.
Bought game in very early access for about $8.00 - could see potential, but it needed work and content was limited. Thought it was a good concept and small amount of money well spent. Never expected what I got for that paltry $8.00.
After playing about an hour and moving on, I noticed that the game was constantly on the update list, so started taking notice of developer updates - man these guys, whoever they are, or whether they are “guys” at all, work very damn hard.
– Real player with 92.7 hrs in game
Exodus H
As it stands this is not a game, maybe you’d call it a foundational engine for one. The videos are misleading, all the demonstrated functionality seems to be missing or at the very least fundamentally broken. I reported a bug that was fixed and patched in a few hours though, so there is hope I might have cause to change my review later. I considered getting a refund really as it seems that no one is actively testing the game before releasing, but that last patch made me choose not to. I might regret that choice later if there is not enough patches and improvements in the next couple of weeks.
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
Planetbase
REVIEW AND GUIDE
This review will basically criticize bad reviews of this game and hopefully provide insight for those seeking it. I am not affiliated with this game.
I’m thoroughly enjoying this game. It looks to have good replayability. Like every other builder I’ve played once you have built everything there is not as much to do except to keep it going. In other games, for me building up is the most fun and the building-up part of this game is a blast. It is challenging(!) and keeps me on the edge of my seat. I checked guides before playing, but still had things to learn.
– Real player with 273.8 hrs in game
In short:
You can barely interact with anything. There is not enough content. Haven’t noticed any update. The game is way too simple. Once you complete the initial tutorial the game has nothing more to offer.
How do I spend most of the game time?
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The speed of the game is almost always at maximum, yet still have the bored feeling of having to wait for way too long (half an hour?!) for anything to happen.
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Turning on or off structures to reduce electricity usage.
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I can even ignore emergencies as I can’t really interact with them and a redundantly built base just survives anything.
– Real player with 71.0 hrs in game
Exogate Initiative
Exogate Initiative is a management/base-building game that puts you in charge of mankind’s first worlds exploration program. In the near future, a new technology will allow us to travel instantly anywhere in the universe, via portals known as Exogates. An international initiative is created to develop this technology and start the first exploration program.
You will lead mankind into the vast unknown, where we never before dreamt to tread.
In the depth of a mountain plan, excavate and build your base using a variety of specialized rooms and equipment.
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Complete freedom to dig anywhere on the map.
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Plan and build specialized rooms, explorers will need barracks to rest, a training field to prepare for their missions or a laboratory to study samples they brought back from other worlds.
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Place equipment in these rooms, each one of them will have a dedicated purpose.
Recruit, train and manage specialists from all around the world.
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You will unlock 6 different classes of explorers, the scientist will study flora and fauna on other worlds, the scholar will decipher alien culture and languages and the soldier will ensure everyone is safe.
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Explorers are called gaters, they are completely autonomous.
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Each gater is unique. They come from different countries, have different ages, look different.
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Take care of their needs and ensure their well-being, both physical and psychological, as they are constantly facing the unknown.
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They will develop relationships between each other, and losing a friend on a mission will not have the same impact as losing someone you hate.
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Provide them with the tools and suits needed for their journey
Assemble teams and send them exploring new worlds through the Exogate.
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Gaters will perform missions on their own but will request your help from time to time.
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These contacts are micro interactive stories that will constantly try to surprise you, and where you will sometimes have to make difficult decisions.
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They may discover new flora, fauna or even intelligent beings. There are more than 10 different kinds of encounters
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After each mission, teams will return with more experience and interesting things to study. This will allow you to unlock new technologies and earn money to keep the initiative running.
Don’t forget to wishlist and follow!
Imagine Earth
I purchased this game some time ago and have waited a long time to review it, due in part to some issues I had with it, but also because I wanted to be fair, considering that it is an early access game. So with that being said, my review:
So I was flipping through the steam games and I came across this game called “Imagine Earth” in the simulation section, I saw that it had a demo and decided to try it. At the time the demo only had a missions available, a simple interface and not a lot in the way of content… but I was hooked.
– Real player with 41.7 hrs in game
I really like Imagine Earth. It’s a fun, lightweight city building game, where you have to keep track of not only economical, but ecological development as well.
The game has come a long way since its appearance on Steam. I get, that a lot of people compare this to games like Anno, don’t! Anno was made by a company worth billions, this game was made by a small indy team.
And especially in times of heat waves and forest fires in North America and South Europe, never seen floods in Europe and Asia it is good to see, that some people still try to educate about global warning.
– Real player with 29.0 hrs in game