Beautiful, long-lasting and pleasantly made, this is Aven Colony – the star among the building strategies. Although it copies many things from less known games, it managed to keep its own and dignified face.

I had an absolute blast playing through Aven. It’s as absorbing as it is relaxing, and it does a good job at bringing its own to the table whilst still retaining what makes city builders fun and challenging. The challenges it brings are unique and fun, and though there might be a few changes I’d personally like to see added, not having them doesn’t deduct much at all from the gameplay.

Aven Colony is a well made city-building strategy game. Well-known solutions were improved and the end result makes you play for hours at a time. The "just one more building" syndrome is strong with this one - even irritating music and occasional graphical issues don't matter that much. Aven Colony is simply a good game.

Aven Colony could have been a great space sim manager: there are some good and original ideas, but the game is really easy, without a real challenge, and a lot of things simply don't work, gameplay-wise.

Boring sandbox mode is partly compensated by the campaign: in each mission developers came up with new ways to complicate the life of the colonists, while at the same time unraveling a story about the imminent end of the world and the search for alien artifacts. [Issue#223, p.60]

Tactical city-sim for the sub-menu-phobic. [Issue#265, p.58]

I spent the equivalent of a working week playing Aven Colony and it was hard labor. This is a game of relentless concentration and chore-work, with only the briefest flashes of magic and relief, offering almost nothing new to the city building, or resource management genres.