Without involving the micromanagement of something like Transport Giant, it’s also a game that offers just enough complexity to offer players a management challenge, and a sense of rewarding satisfaction when they’ve built up a sustainable, large, city. The story mode itself is quite poor, but as with any good city builder, all the fun’s in the sandbox mode anyway, and unleashing both your inner creative and inner city planner at once.

The game strikes a superb balance of introducing its systems and giving one enough freedom to live and learn.

City building games don't usually find their way onto consoles and rarely are they as well-executed as Aven Colony.

The first impressions of Aven Colony are great, as you build your first colony, finding your way on this alien world. It doesn’t take too long before you start to see the limitations, whether by design or by mistake, leaving this as a city builder that’s easy to pick up and play, but one that could do with a little more depth.

It's initially very engrossing, but once you've established a colony or two, there's very little left to keep you hooked. [Sept 2017, p.91]

Offering many hours of solid city building gameplay, with the potential to play from your couch and bringing to the table an actual campaign rather than just countless sandboxes, Aven Colony is an excellent little title, which we can particularly recommend for console players.

Though the campaign is unimaginative and some areas are not fleshed out as well as they could have been, the game is still addictive stuff. But, once you’ve run through the campaign you’re only left with the sandbox mode, which grinds to a halt as soon as you start to do well.