No game that induces me to grab a pencil and a piece of graph paper is going to be bad, but even a two levels in when I got to sketching I didn't quite understand how sublime The Colonists was going to be. My wife and I played this side by side for over 100 hours, and only decided to give it a rest this evening when we finally got gold on the final (non-combat) campaign mission.
The Colonists is a lesson on the ways that simple systems can intersect toe create blossoming complexity, and the ways you can control and channel that complexity. Although on the surface it's a city-builder like many others, its resource allocation and movement mechanics will cause a naïve city layout to crumble into traffic jams and stagnation. The heart of the game is understanding how your resources should flow, how they actually flow, and how you can transform the one into the other.
The one drawback (other than the uncomfortably imperialist name) is that the game has more than a handful of bugs. It's nothing unexpected: it's made by a one-man indie studio, and he's been highly responsive to my many bug reports. But there is something a bit soul-crushing about diving deep into the ebb and flow of resources in your colony to find the root cause of a systemic failure, only to realize that it's just a glitch rather than something you could have foreseen and avoided. That said, Liz and I loved this game bugs and all, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
The Colonists is a lesson on the ways that simple systems can intersect toe create blossoming complexity, and the ways you can control and channel that complexity. Although on the surface it's a city-builder like many others, its resource allocation and movement mechanics will cause a naïve city layout to crumble into traffic jams and stagnation. The heart of the game is understanding how your resources should flow, how they actually flow, and how you can transform the one into the other.
The one drawback (other than the uncomfortably imperialist name) is that the game has more than a handful of bugs. It's nothing unexpected: it's made by a one-man indie studio, and he's been highly responsive to my many bug reports. But there is something a bit soul-crushing about diving deep into the ebb and flow of resources in your colony to find the root cause of a systemic failure, only to realize that it's just a glitch rather than something you could have foreseen and avoided. That said, Liz and I loved this game bugs and all, and I can't recommend it highly enough.