Astro Colony – Review – Ophelia Payne

Astro Colony is a co-op multiplayer base-building factory automation game set in space. After your previous space station gets sucked into a black hole, you are starting from scratch and hoping to rebuild. You have a lot of freedom in where you build, and you use asteroids as your basic fuel source. Like any base builder, each building has its own limitations and requirements, so you will have to plan accordingly so as to not run out of resources. There are 3 modes: Survival, Construction and Sandbox. My review will focus on the Survival mode.

I enjoy factory automation-type games, and I have played a lot of them. If you have good logistical pipelines and tight mechanics, then generally the game will do well. But, for me, I also want a nice location/visuals and decent audio. With Astro Colony being set in space, there wasn’t a lot to look at or variation in visuals. Also lacking was much of a story. Now, I don’t usually play these types of games for a story; more often, it’s to scratch an itch in my brain that loves the order in this genre. You are briefly told the reason why you are there: you survived the previous space station’s destruction and are tasked with rebuilding this one. Simple and to the point. While I would have liked a little more narrative, that’s not a real detractor for the game.

All factory automation games start with resources at their nodes. In space, the map is large, and the deposits are rare. Iron, copper, carbon and ice are on asteroids that need to be harvested/mined as they pass by, or you will miss out and must wait for the next one. This is a new mechanic I hadn’t experienced in this genre.

Next comes the way you get the resources to travel. Conveyor belts supported with wires, pipes and even drones make up the movement options. Lever, splitters, etc., will all be part of the movement options.

Now, the part that I struggled with is that resources go in, processed items come out of the machines, and this should be straightforward, but a lot of the input and output were fighting for the same real estate.

While you are building, you also need to make sure you have places for the incoming astronauts to eat and sleep and the ability to make enough oxygen for the inhabitants.

Now, this was messy enough, but before I even got to this point, I had to figure out what to do and how to build. The tutorial wasn’t very clear, and sometimes I found myself just trying things until the bot told me what to do next, just stumbling. As someone who has played a lot of these games, I tried to persevere, but if I were a new player, I likely would have given up quite quickly.

All these issues, on top of flying and movement, gave me some pretty intense motion sickness very quickly. I sadly didn’t see much in the way of settings to help with that either. There are some decent accessibility settings, but I still struggled with the motion of the camera. But you’re floating in space, so I guess that might be expected.

There is a good-sized tech tree, which I appreciate, but some of them were so difficult to unlock that it would have required me to destroy and rebuild large sections, and I just wasn’t up to that task. I did love the feature that when you disassembled something, the parts went into your recycling so you could reuse them, versus being lost forever.

You have basic technology, engineering, chemistry, biology and space as categories of technology to upgrade and unlock. You must balance to make sure you have the astronauts trained in the right categories to upgrade each of them.

Once you get more comfortable with the building and processing, it runs smoothly, and I found it enjoyable for the most part, but the frustrations to get to that point were a long list. It is a pretty game, but it takes a long time and a significant amount of backtracking to learn. It doesn’t feel approachable for new players to the genre. I think veteran players might like some of the things that make this different from other similar games, and the price is good if you want to give it a try.