Astro Colony (PC) - Preview

I’ve stated before that if I have to craft another pickaxe in my life, I’m going to take the code for that game and beat the developer to death with it. Astro Colony is a building, survival, and crafting game where you already have your axe, you just have to create a sustainable colony on a platform falling infinitely through the vacuum of space. Similar to all the Minecraft/Satisfactory-like games, you’ll spend your life crafting something out of iron and copper while hunting for coal (carbon). Anything more precious is on the wind when it comes to your chances of obtaining it easily.

Resource management games are a contentious bone to pick with me. I enjoy them initially but there is a quick drop in my attention toward them. Astro Colony tries to solve some of those problems with a setting I am a little more familiar with, space. It’s the final frontier, don’t you know? Dropped off with your very own Wheatley (it is annoying enough) you transform a stationary platform from a barren husk of existence to a barren husk of existence with more convoluted wiring than the base of the BT tower.

I’m sure that when talking about Satisfactory or Factorio I’ve mentioned my godawful ability to keep automation neat and tidy: A 50-meter by 50-meter platform is not a place I can keep organized, I can’t even keep my office organized. The truth is, I don’t think in a million years I’m going to have anything close to that which you see in screenshots on Steam, I’m too simple (stupid) for that. Unlike me, there is probably someone out there with Excel spreadsheets as 90% of their desktop icons that could mass-industrialize the entirety of whatever randomly picked star-system seed they either chose or get handed.

This is why my attention drops off with games like Astro Colony, I can (and will) play them from time to time, but my goal isn’t absolute optimization. My goal is always to have fun and play a game like it is a game. Not a job I have to make time for after doing work all day. There are aspects of that done throughout Astro Colony such as the survival mechanics being significantly streamlined. You only have to worry about oxygen, and only if you want to. Before starting up a new save, you have to select Yes or No on four options: Oxygen consumption, enable bots, enable boosters, and free construction, all of which are self-explanatory.

In my time, I’ve started three separate worlds to Goldilocks my style of play. The normal world consumes oxygen and enables bots with no boosters or free construction. Then we have a creative world free of breathing and construction, and a normal world with oxygen consumption turned off but boosters are enabled. In the end, I gravitated towards the latter of these three beds to lie in. Though the survival aspect is not focused on drinking or eating but just breathing, the current way it is set up is still frustratingly overbearing at times. In the bottom left, there is a circle that slowly empties, then there is the dotted line around the circle which is your warning alongside red flashing.

This circle-flashing warning works, but only when you can actively see it. Call me old-fashioned, but something just above the center of the screen yelling “You’re going to die!” or even a small double beep similar to Satisfactory‘s health warning as you fall into the dotted circle (or halfway) works better. I’m not asking for much, just something to pull my admittedly short attention span toward the life-and-death situation I find myself in far too often. Survival systems only really work when you can survive more than half the time.

As much as I can praise the ability to turn this off and the ease with which crafting is done, there are no workbenches to create satanic symbols in here. I won’t shower praise onto Astro Colony unquestionably. Like most of these survival-crafting games, you can work out where they line up with your experience in other games and understand it fairly well. Nonetheless, Astro Colony opts for a set of menus spread out across the keyboard with varying degrees of complexity and in turn, with less accessibility. It is like playing modded Minecraft where menus are mapped to X, P, #, G, F8, Scroll Lock, and Page Up.

This is matched with a few progression points that are best described as written in the dirt. The trouble is, I’m not on terra firma. There is one prompt for your annoying puppy dog-like robot that would bark: “deconstruct the destroyed ship,” ok, but what ship? The descriptions are there, but not enough information is really given to the player about where this ship is or how exactly you’re supposed to get colonists to your slice of industrial hazards. I’m pretty sure OSHA wouldn’t say my platform is fit for even the most basic work: Exposed wires are everywhere and there is a neverending void below.

These are a collection of issues of being in early access, a crowd-funded title, and some things possibly being lost in translation. Ignore the early access section with “Astro Colony is the work of a solo developer[…]” on Steam, because if that is the case why does the Kickstarter for Astro Colony note a team of eight including artists, a programmer, a designer, and a composer? What is evident here with Astro Colony thus far, I enjoy well enough, especially when I put a podcast on and shut the world off. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean it lacks problems.

The aforementioned explanations are sometimes solvable and at other times puzzling. The phrasing of planetoids and planets for small and slightly larger discs of dirt that should be balanced on the back of elephants can be confusing to some. Don’t expect full celestial bodies, most are minable platforms made of dirt, some ice, maybe some carbon, and some will oddly have some plant life on them despite a lack of water a majority of the time. Some phrasing surrounding docking or other aspects of these planet/planetoid and colonist elements of the Astro Colony could generally do with streamlining.

Truth be told, once you’re into that point of the game, the regular issues I have with these survival-crafting games crop up. The complexity of systems and the overall need to interact with certain aspects become too demanding without proper explanation or balance for fun. This combined with several menus to regularly hop in and out of by using a convoluted control scheme I actively had to change or I’d have gone mad, isn’t innately accessible.

In fact, I turned to the one person I know that loves this type of game to see if I was just stupid. No, even after reading all the tutorial elements and blasting through the majority of Astro Colony, similar points stumped us both. Or we’re just both idiots.

Ultimately, Astro Colony is a great idea for a new survival-crafting title that several people will adore for years to come, but it is no Minecraft, Factorio, or Satisfactory at this stage. The other titles mentioned are some that I’d suggest to those who are similarly disinterested in absolute optimization, but Astro Colony is a specialist title for many spreadsheet specialists. It is something with enough complexity and enough interesting ideas to stand out against the background of many survival crafting titles. It doesn’t revolutionize the ideas enough to write home about though.

A PC preview copy of Astro Colony was provided by Terad Games for this review.