After the PC launch in 2018, Codebyfire finally released its cool strategy game The Colonists on Consoles. The protagonists of this cute title are a band of hardworking robots who have traveled to a distant world to create an independent life, a life in the future in order to be able to fulfill his only dream and wish: to become human.
You might be wondering if a city building game about robots trying to be human can be fun. Well, the robots in The Colonists mimic human life as best they can: they farm the land, they build buildings, they mine fields … all to make their community more competent and better.
Unlike other strategy games, The Colonists makes everything simple and easy to understand. There’s still a lot to explore and unravel, but the upgrade systems, builds, and resources are simplified so they can be learned quickly. The different materials, buildings, and tasks that robots can perform are so diverse that the game is exciting. At the same time, you don’t have to be an expert in strategy games to complete the tasks or unlock other works of this type. Everything is designed so that all you have to do is pause for a moment and think about a creative solution to a problem, and that’s it.
Imagine if your neighborhood has risen a bit. In a game like Civilization, you would face so many problems from both your city and your neighbors that they seem impossible to fix and often become a bit unbearable. With The Colonists, thanks to its simple design, everything happens faster and can be solved more easily. That you have a shortage of food? Well, build a farm or two and you’re done. Problems with a lack of space to increase the population and energy reserves? All you need to do is upgrade the buildings and support them with the right infrastructure. The point is that the problems are easy to solve, which removes the stress associated with this genre and makes it much easier to assimilate the game.
Building a colony won’t be your only concern at The Colonists. There will be rival colonies that can cause you problems and it will be your duty to make sure that the colony is well defended and able to deal with threats. Such rivals are only an obstacle if you choose to play the campaign against the AI, a powerful enemy considering this charming city building game shines when you find yourself in the campaign with no combat or sandbox mode none Having to worry about others. These different game modes make The Colonists an interesting title, but the game’s main flaw is that there isn’t much else.
After completing the campaign missions, the only alternative besides ever building up and popping in sandbox mode is to complete a few (very few) challenges or come back to the campaign and try to improve the phase times. The challenges, which are currently four, will ask you to complete some secondary objectives during certain missions of the campaign and frankly they are not very exciting. Finishing the stages in less time will give you a better medal depending on how good your time is, and understanding the basics of the game probably won’t cost you too much either. Of course, the colonists’ simplicity is one of their strengths, but the lack of challenges works like a double-edged sword because once the campaign is over there isn’t much content left to keep you going.
This brings us to the biggest disadvantage we have when playing The Colonists, which involves throwing stones at your own roof. There are some mechanics that are constructed in very peculiar ways, such as how roads work. You can’t just build a road like that; you have to build it three to four units apart. This often means that the streets connecting the buildings have strange shapes, as all the buildings must be connected to a street. It’s the kind of system that makes you wonder why it does, as it would be so much easier if roads could be built like in virtually any other city building game.
That said, it has to be said that we enjoyed the colonists. It is a city building strategy game designed so that everyone can enjoy it, both beginners and experts in the genre. It’s a lovable and charming game, and although there is a lack of interesting content after the campaign ends, it still manages to provide a satisfying experience for first-time players.
