Project AURA

dead game, stay away. go play factorio or something.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Project Aura so far. 23 hours I’ve only scratched the surface. There are various deep gameplay mechanics. You need to learn about the UI and what is needed to do to progress but it is that way with most unique, creative, and awesome game experiences. I wouldn’t consider it a barrier to entry. There are small tutorials together you going. Overall a great addition to the Colony Sim, Base and City Building, Resource Management genres, not to be missed. Please continue creating games!

build an apartment complex and watch people go back and forth. absolutely boring ass game

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While the game looks like your Typical city builder its more about managing EVERYTHING about each and every little thing in the game, something requires something else which requires some technology that requires some advancement whch requires some resource which is hidden in some menu which is available at some time after finding something to be bought from some menu. and the game tells you NOTHING. There is a tiny tutorial which tells you how to how to hire workers to get a supply chain going and then you start your first mission and the game has it all locked off untill some milestone. I've spend more time on google trying to find out what I'm supposed to be doing than playing the game.

This game makes me very sad. There's a good game buried underneath here, I'm convinced of that. Problem is that it looks like the dev got in way over his head, made an over-complicated mess, decided he couldn't/wouldn't bother to fix what he had done, and threw it onto Steam. And I'm one of the suckers that paid for it, even though I got it very cheap on sale.. I regret not refunding it. I figured I'd put some time into it and figure it out. I'm still determined to try. It's a hot mess, though. I was just building something that required wiring. I had to figure out what produced wiring, then how to switch my production chain, one by one, over to creating everything that eventually produced wiring. By the time I had figured that out, I couldn't remember what I was intending to build initially. I never did remember, because once I got all that done, there were about 10 other things that required my attention. Trying to navigate through all the menus is horrible. Nothing is straightforward. You know you've seen the one you're looking for at any given moment, but you have no idea how to get back to it because there are so many. There is just way too much crap going on. The tutorial does nothing to prepare you. It's like teaching you first grade math and then saying "Ok, I think you're ready for this college level calc final".

They say Air Traffic Control is the most stressful job in the world because of the volume of decisions those folks have to make that could mean life or death. They ought to use this game as training. If they can figure this out, they're good to go.

God it hurts to give this one a negative review!
It's been on my wishlist pretty much since it came out waiting for a decent sale... (Which took WEIRDLY long by the way, far longer than a typical game would)
And I I finally bought it...
And here's the thing.
It seems like it could, potentially? be a good game... If you can make heads or tails of it.
The UI is some of the least intuitive I've ever seen and I couldn't finish the TUTORIAL because NOTHING worked the way you expected it to. I only managed to scrape by most of the tutorial because it held my hands and led me through it saying "Click this, click that", but half the time I couldn't understand why I was doing half the stuff I was doing, or why it stretched things over 3 processes that in any other game would've been FAR shorter and simpler.

The concept seems simple enough, you build a building, unfreeze a colonist, assign it to that building and start that building working. But the WAY you have to do it it just... So convoluted! There's like 6 different windows you need to navigate in order to do that very simple thing, and some of them include concepts I still have no clue what they are supposed to do, and each one of these windows is opened in a completely different way. Some from the menu, some from hovering over the building, and some from inside a different window which GOOD LUCK TO YOU REMEMBERING WHICH ONE THAT WAS!

I love me a good, detailed city builder. I am not above micromanagement and little detailed mechanics. And I'm pretty sure if you see the logic behind how everything works like I'm sure the dev does - it's probably a really cool game.
But as someone who ISN'T the Dev, and DOESN'T already know know how it's supposed to work, I was struggling to wrap my head around ANY of it through the tutorial, and when, at the end of the tutorial it told me "Okay, now build, staff and run a building all on your own" I didn't even know how to do that. And that is a BIG, BIG problem.
I might be able to understand the mechanics if I replay the tutorial once or twice more but... Frankly it was an unenjoyable, confusing process, and I'd rather just jump to another game instead.

I'm sorry, Dev, I really really wanted to like this one.

Worth it for the $5 I paid on sale.

Took me a very long time to realise that it's a harsh optimisation game, not a colony building/management game.

You get punished for expanding, so the objective appears to be to cram as much as you can into the limitations of the lower colony levels.

The graphics of the world itself are kind of nice, but very static and largely irrelevant to the game beyond a bit of building placement tetris that is quite dissatisfying as buildings tend not to fit snugly into the available space. All up I feel like it's playing a spreadsheet, but with everything in annoying to access places.

I didn't bother deeply exploring the fine grained optimisations it looks like you can make at an individual colonist level, it felt like the default choice everywhere was sufficient, although it left me making a TON of clicks that didn't feel like I was making any choices.

There's a market, which is kind of nice, but it took me a long time to find the "auto sell" technology, which IMO should be part of the default UI.

There is also a lot of performance jank. Pretty sure my FPS are solid and high, but the way the simulation updates still leaves large pauses, which also misses buttons and steals focus.

The challenges that come up all feel a lot like death spirals. Either you foresaw them and can handle them, or you didn't and it's time to start again.

The tutorial seems like it gives you enough to get started, but it really doesn't. There's a lot of mechanics that are not well explained by the game and you need to go searching in wiki's to get a handle on them

The premise is cool, there is a lot here that I want to like, so I gave it a good 14 hours, but ultimately I don't think it's there. Playing feels like a chore and I'm no longer expecting to see a payoff when I become "good" at it

And to think the reviews had me scared. So ok, I now see why a lot of people have mixed reactions about this game, it does NOT in any way fit into the "twitter casual mobile console button masher culture| so embraced to day in the dumb downed gaming industry. (Excuse me while I get elitist for a moment..lol). After doing the tutorials which were very precise, and some of the campaign (further advanced tutorials for the most part) i began to see the problem. You can NOT learn or play this game at the beginning with distraction. and that's a good thing. You cannot have your kids buzzing round your head, or be watching netflix on your other computer, or anything else aside from PLAYING THE GAME while attempting to learn the mechanics and how things work in this game.

yes it is complex, and can be overwhelming until you shut up and concentrate. Once I did that, I "got it|, I "saw" how things worked and how they blend together and I at one point even stopped and said to myself, ok, I see the reviews but it this wasn't so scary after all. The game has very nice graphics, I had ZERO technical issues of any kind, and though complex, once I gave it my attention things ran pretty smoothly. There's lots to remember and I suppose this could be considered a "brainy game". But it's very fun, especially leveling up your employees and all that jazz. I can see why such a game, In the culture we now live or tweets and candy crush and button mashing why a game that requires concentration and an actual learning curve (that is well gifted to you in very detailed tutorials) to then enjoy.

If you can handle such a game, a game that requires you to PLAY IT without distraction at first, you will find this game extremely enjoyable. Don't let the "micromanagement hell" reviews scare you as it did me for so long. you are probably SMARTER than you think and more adept at gaming than your button mashing would lead you to believe if you gave yourself permission and a chance to do something that takes more concentration than tapping a phone, or an X-Y-Y Left Pad compo". you may find you can actually play a game that takes brains, which you probably have, if you just allowed it to WAKE UP once in a while..lol

I bought this a while back along with several other sale items, and never got around to trying it until now. I sure wish I'd tried it back when I first got it so that I could get a refund.

The biggest problem is that there is no UI scaling. At 1080p (Full HD) everything is much too small to read. At lower resolutions, the windows are all scrunched together on top of each other and you can't do anything. (You have to do a LOT of dragging and dropping between different windows in this game.) The developers were asked about this and they basically dismissed it saying "Full HD is how you should play it". Well, sorry developers, I can't!

Just trying to get through the tutorials took way more effort than it should have. In one tutorial, they say "click on the play button". Well, clicking on the play/pause button does nothing and there are no other play buttons on the screen. After digging around I found you have to right click on a certain element in a window and THAT has the play button on it. Geez.

I had to go out hunting to try to solve several similar problems, and I only made it through 5 of the 6 tutorials before I gave up. Every time I'd eventually find the solution, I'd find that the developers were aware of the problem and said they'd fix it, but obviously they never fixed any of it.

There are also slightly annoying grammatical mistakes throughout.

This may be a game I'd really enjoy, but without UI scaling so that I can read it and a way to learn to play it, I'll never know.

Project Aura is a settlement management game similar to Tropico, but with absolutely no AI-controlled anything, micromanagement cranked up to 11, and a need for tons and tons of analytical reasoning and strategy planning.

My best guess is that not many people like such degree of micromanagement and that's why it has a rather high share of negative reviews. I don't think it's any bad, it's just not everybody's cup of tea. If you really hate AI-controlled mechanics that always seem to fail or where the AI is incompetent at controlling it, this game is for you.

Mind you, though: this game is for extremely hard thinking people. In this game, you're actually going to have to assess the situation and plan your moves in a text document and think very thoroughly your actions. Not doing so will make you fail spectacularly as your colony grows larger and with increasingly more complex problems. It actually helps to have a basic training in process engineering in order to map logistic chains.

Aesthetically it's also a great game, with great graphics and a pretty great soundtrack.

Probably my greatest gripe is that the UI is not exactly very helpful. It would really benefit from a logistic mapping view that showed where X resource is made and where is it consumed, and maybe an option to highlight buildings belonging to one particular chain with a certain color. Otherwise I'm going to have to manually map my colonies and that's not exactly helpful. Another greatly helpful option, borrowed from No Man's Sky, would be the ability to pin stuff like constructions or production units to your Quests along with their requirements, or maybe pinning a colony expansion. This game is under constant development, so I hope the dev team will eventually add this feature.

All in all, I recommend this game. Do be prepared to bear with some lacking features and pay close attention to the tutorial and the introductory campaign, but in general it's great.

Is this actually released? It seems to be, but it operates like it is still in development. As it stands now, I can't recommend this. I'm going to hold onto it (purchased it on sale) and try to see if it gets ironed into shape eventually.

What's wrong? Fundamentally, the game doesn't have a lot to help the new player. This is a game that is shooting for complexity, but buries that complexity in a series of awful tutorials. If you deviate even a tiny bit from the instructions, you'll be stuck. Once the tutorials are done, you pretty much have to play the campaign game in order to actually learn the game, because the tutorials focued on the UI.

The campaign game you start with has immense problems. The largest and most egregious flaw is the lack of a Save game functionality in the campaign. It can take hours to advance to a reasonable point where you're finally understanding what and how the game works. Then you run into something else.

In my case, I ran into the 'Expand' the station portion of the campaign. There's no clear way to proceed from this point, as the UI didn't seem to recognize that I had all the required documents in my inventory, but wouldn't let me purchase the technology. The names on the technology and the error message telling me I didn't have the correct technology were different, and may have been 'fixed' in another language (PA does seem to have a lot of recent patch activity related to language support). I ended up doing several things 'outside' the quest, and used many of the resources I had worked to build.

The principle function behind the game is queue managemet. The queues need another control to allow the current operation to finish (without interrupting and seemingly discarding process). This requires micromanagement to time when the current build operation finishes and before the next build begins.

The basic building footprint takes a bit too much physical space in a game with limited space. If a building isn't put in the exact space, it will interfere with future buildings. Manipulating the buildings when they are placed needs some work, as you drag the template by holding the LMouse, but rotating the 'footprint' is done with the mouse wheel. That almost requires 2 hands to put a building in the right place/orientation. (Unless the tutorial missed something very important).

Buildings take up all this space, but they manage to feel too small. The pre-made templates are often confining, as you might want/need a recycling plant with 2 Recyclers instead of 1 Recycler and 1 Assembly. If that possibility exists, it's beyond where I have gotten so far. The time on most of the queues seems about right, all except for collecting fertilizer. It's quite possible for 25 people in two base level tenements to produce 3200 units of fertilizer in 25 days (furtherest I've gotten into a campaign). But, since I've only seen 7 of the 23 basic building types, it's very difficult to get a handle on how well the various queues work.

Right now, this game seems like it could be a very good simulation/model once it gets some much needed balance and tweaking. It's just not ready to play, yet.

You will love this game if:
* you like to think and plan and analyze
* you don't mind wrapping your head around a slightly different way of looking at buildings and production lines
* you like clever layers of production and technology dependencies
* you enjoy external, and occasionally overlapping, threats to your colonists' well being

The game has many startup options which can be set to customize your experience, but the main gameplay loop consists of asking the questions "what do I want (next)? and then "how do I get there?" while keeping your colonists fed, hydrated, and happy.

This gameplay loop is very heavily influenced by your choice of "Affinity" at the beginning of the game. You can ally with one of four corporations working to rebuild the shattered remnants of humanity, or go it alone. Every corporation brings different tech to the table, and your access to higher level tech from a rival corporation will not be easy or quick.

There are plenty of different resources in the game -- actual physical resources like plastic and steel, colonist statistics like comfort and morale, and colony-wide resources such as energy and maintenance. Obtaining, generating, and processing these resources can be a bit heavy on the micromanagement, but the game offers excellent tools (such as the Resource Window) to alleviate the worst of it.

There are victory conditions, but for me the fun part is the ride - discovering how to survive and thrive, wrapping my head around all the different moving parts, and making them work. Choosing between the four corporations or going solo has such a huge effect on the early game (especially on higher difficulty levels) that it is almost like five games in one. At one hundred hours I don't even feel like I've scratched the surface yet.

So far I haven't even mentioned graphics or sound design; both are excellent. There is enough animation and ambient sound present to completely immerse you, and the soundtrack is atmospheric and unintrusive (I still have it on, even now). Buildings are vibrant and distinct and there are several nifty graphical cues that enhance your ability to read what is going on at a glance but don't interfere with the presentation.

Technically the game has performed well on my low-end gaming rig, although it suffers from slowdown after long periods of play it has never actually crashed on me. The game is well polished; as far as I could tell in my hundred hours it was totally bug free.

Protip: Ultra difficulty is not impossible. It just feels like it the first several times.

Favorite moment: a failed Ultra run where ALL of my colonists, suffering from dehydration and poor morale, became "Insane". I bravely soldiered on but my nascent colony just did not have the ability to deal with mass insanity. When everyone died, the game *congratulated* me on getting rid of my Insanity problem without resorting to Police Drones (yes, those are a thing you can build if you like). I lol'ed. Then I started again.

Project AURA's goal is developing a colony and surviving on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The colony stands on the ocean and is sealed from the hazardous environment by a protective dome. The idea is that you start from scratch and then grow and expand your colony. You’re supposed to increase your population, construct buildings and research new technologies while managing an economic simulation of some sort involving resources processing and transportation of goods and people to and from the outside world.

You start with nothing. You have no buildings, nothing to use for survival, and almost nothing to build your colony with. You will have to start collecting everything as you play, getting your hands on anything that you can find. As you play, you will start to have just enough to build and to maintain. To help your colony reach your goal, you will also need to train and specialize the people, as well as specialize the colony itself. You will have to eventually make the choice of being either a self-sufficient colony or one that trades with others.

Your main means of obtaining resources is by gathering raw materials or by processing them and you can recover valuable remains from the 21st Century. You will also be assigned missions, which may result in a prize in the form of resources.
You process goods through Organization Charts in which you can see and edit the relationship between a building, its blueprints and its workers.

This game is all about strategic, planning, finding new approaches, learning from mistakes, and designing a functional and attractive colony. All of this requires effort and time. You have to think about everything you do and you have to use your resources wisely.

Project AURA caters to a particular audience of hardcore strategy/city builder fans, but this difficult to master game won’t be for everyone.

THE GOOD
- Excellent game logic
- Novel backstory
- Interesting production and research
- Complicated production chains
- Micromanagement of the colonists and the buildings

THE BAD
- The tutorial is inadequate for teaching you the game mechanics
- Complicated production chains
- Micromanagement of the colonists and the buildings

7/10

DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | GREAT | AMAZING | MASTERPIECE
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Having 87 hours of game time i think i can now write a beginners review of this game.
Firstly It looks great and sounds great the game is stable with very few bugs.
As a simulation its very good your buildings all have defined purposes (one of which is to remind you of just how great stargate atlantis really was) and the blueprint you add to the building instructs it what to do, which i think is very smart because in a robotic tech age i think this is how buildings would probably function with hardware / software.

It at this stage it has everything needed to be a good game (and worth the money),

BUT (and its a big BUT) At the start your pretty much on a railroad track that is that you have to get your plastics being extracted and refined and then food and water, research, power, diplomacy. which is great its all there But it requires expansion to fufill its promise of being a great game.
I personally feel that there needs to be a few more possibilities of how to get to where your going, and what type of colony you build should reflect your choices not your needs all the time.

But In Short if you like Planetbase, Sim city, Space engineers, ect -x-Then get your wallet out-x-

If you like to micromanage the hell out of something then this is the best damned game for you. You have to balance and fine tune your incoming resources with the needs of an ever expanding colony.

PXQ Games has really put a lot of effort into crafting a niche game for those of us who like to test our managerial and planning abilities.

You WILL NOT be handed an easy time. This game is not meant to be EASY. If you don't build smart, plan or manage well, you will pay for it. especially on the harder settings. If you can't figure something out. You're playing it wrong. Ask me. I'll help you. I fully recommend this game. I also made a couple guides for it.

Pull your socks up and tighten your belt. The name of the game is base building and resource management with a twist. The planet is already burnt out. We lost. You are the only survivors. BOOM. Everyone is gone, toast. What now? Cryogenics tubes.....Let's all hide. Maybe it will all go away. One hundred years passes, you open your cyrochamber and peak out. Nope it still sucks out there. Looks like its up to YOU to rebuild the whole world...by yourselves. Yuck. Back to bed or get up and stir the coffee? Up to you guys. It's gonna be a challenge.

It is not for the simple minded or the casual gamer. It is difficult and time consuming. You will either hate it or REALLY love it.

If this game is for you...you know it already. Enough said.

I've played about 12 hours worth. Each time I play it I get a little further along in the tech tree. Don't expect to get it right on your first try. This means starting a NEW game again and again until you learn the ropes. ARRRRRGGGGHHHH....start over? what?

I play the game up to a certain point and my Cryo-Genic Preservation Survival Colony/town fails. The only option is to start a new game. There is no undo button if you make a mistake. Cryo-What? Cryogenics is the deep freezing sleep technology from the video games DOOM 3 and Fallout 4 and the Alien movies with Sigorney Weaver. You know the one. It will save your body for hundreds of years so they can develop a cure or repair the planet but you might not like what you find when you wake up hundreds of years in the future and find zombies everywhere. That kind of thing. (that didn't really happen in DOOM 3 and Fallout 4 or Aliens but it was close enough some kind of scientists messed it all up experimenting and well where was I oh yea, the earth is POOF, gone. hopefully this got your attention) Well there are no zombies in this game, only it's worse, starvation, planet resources are exhausted, atmosphere is a mess. Real "you should stay in bed" kind of stuff.

Not surprisingly, the tech tree is mostly guess work for the new player. There is a very intuitive and useful construction materials calculator that will be very helpful to you here. This window will show you exactly what is needed to build each building. However, it does have limitations when planning further up the tech tree. You will have to use your own wits to survive.

The developers are busy tweaking the tech tree and survival elements. It is still in early access. SLAM....CLICK....SWISH....SWISH...PRESSURISING TUBES....you have reached: EARLY ACCESS.......CRYO-SLEEP INITIATING....3..2..1......100 years later....CRYO-SLEEP emerging.....you wake up....nope still EARLY ACCESS......but things ARE improving...back to CRYO-SLEEP....sweet dreams until the next update...

The game is challenging fun and has promise of more rewards down the road.

Is $20 expensive? Heck, I used to drop $20 a day, what we used to call two rolls of quarters, on pinball machines back in the 1970s and 1980s and walk away with nothing but a memory. Were a few rolls of quarters worth it to play a pinball machine for an hour or two. Damn right it was. Yes. For twenty bucks you get to keep this game for-EVER. Is it worth it? Yes. No. Maybe. That is up to you to decide. I don't know how rich you are. Am I rich? Hell no, I spent all my money on pinball machines back when I was a kid. Now I am broke. Now I am here complaining to you about it. Either way you are gonna have to pay it if you wanna play the game. Use your cryogenic chamber and by the time you wake up $20 will be worth about a nickle. Good luck survivors. (Note to self, how long have I been writing this review? who am I, where am I, where did I put the keys to my Cryogenic Chamber? Someone let me out of this dang tube, this THING....HELP ME we have to complete PROJECT AURA...... there is no one else left but us...we must survive....aaarrrrrrgggghhh....)

TL;DR – As an early access game this has a lot going for it already. It needs to work on balancing resource development and technology progression, but the management systems at the core of the game are excellent and the devs are present in the steam/PA forums so the Q&A available makes getting a grasp on the mechanics more than doable.

This game takes the concepts behind the Anno series and games like Banished and then dives into the mechanics of colonist, resource and technology management and lets you micromanage the heck out of them. Progression is slow and every advance you make, be it adding a food item to the menu or unlocking a new tier of technology, must be meticulously calculated. That’s why I love it.

To give you an idea of resource management, one of the more simple things in the game are plastics: you will need 3 different types (alpha, beta, gamma) throughout the game and a plastic manufacturing chain will be the second or third thing every colony establishes. You need to:

• Build a hangar
  
• Buy an alpha ship
  
• Unfreeze a director, a pilot, and a technician and assign them to the hangar
  
• Buy an alpha ship mission and set it to collect plastic garbage
  
• Buy a maintenance blueprint
  
• Set start/repeat on the alpha ship mission and maintenance blueprints
  
• Build a recycling center
  
• Unfreeze a director, two recyclers, and a technician and assign them to the recycling center
  
• Buy a recycling blueprint and set it to recycle plastic garbage
  
• Buy a maintenance blueprint
  
• Set start/repeat on the recycling and maintenance blueprints
  
• Build a plastics sorting/melting/flaking facility
  
• Unfreeze the five colonists necessary to work there
  
• Buy or unlock the four blueprints for the facility
  
• Set the production chains for the last two blueprints to queue alpha, beta and gamma plastics
  
• Set start/repeat on the four blueprints
  
• Build a prefab facility
  
• Unfreeze the colonists necessary to work there
  
• Buy or unlock the blueprints for the facility
  
• Set the production chain to queue alpha, beta and gamma plastics
  
[*]Set start/repeat on the blueprints

If you don’t have a blueprint or one is not on the market and you don’t have a blueprint left to unlock, then you have a whole separate production chain to work on for researching them. This process isn’t nearly as tedious as it may sound at first and the experience makes getting a production chain up and running that much more rewarding. The game is full of logistical challenges, and as you progress, the systems can become more complicated and rely more on other systems, which speaks to the game balance.

The balance of resources produced to resources used is already great. The balance of technologies researched to technology cost needs some improvement. It can be difficult to expand at all once the technologies to unlock power upgrades (vital for expansion) start requiring core techs/documents, because these take considerable resources to develop, not to mention a lot of time. While completely possible, this does cause long spans in the game where it seems like you’re doing nothing but waiting.

As for foods, ship add-ons, automation stations and power modules, the game offers a myriad of evermore-complex upgrades that make noticeable improvements to every corner of your colony.

Where the game needs the most improvement right now (patch 2.96.2) is in the imparting of information. The game either needs at least a half dozen more tutorials, or a pure sandbox mode. This would go a long way towards teaching non-economic-worldbuilder-veterans how to get a good start, since the slightest mistake early in game could devastate your colony and make you just start over.

At the moment it’s also absolutely necessary to claim some bonus packages at the new colony screen, because without some free blueprints and power modules, you’re asking for a dead colony. It would be nice if there were either more tier-1 blueprints available on the market, or security boxes were easier to get in a level 1 colony.

The game also doesn’t have any resource graphs that I could find, so it’s difficult to track a decline in food or fertilizer or water over time. For that, you have to keep an eye on the numbers of resources in your inventory and try to remember values so you notice if you’re running out of something. Graphs would be a great addition.

There is also nowhere to see a summary of what level colonists you have and the available housing space for that tier. I currently have to manually add up the number of junior, senior and master colonists I have and then visually check to make sure I have enough residences to house them. A summary screen for this info would be a great addition.

It would also be nice if there were some more glitter; 1x1 and 1x2 parks, industrial gadgets, commercial outlets, something to fill in the extra space left over once you’ve completely filled a platform.

Overall I’m happy I bought it and 100 hours in I’m going to be playing it more, even though it’s not finished and things like drones and energy combos haven’t been implemented – I’m excited for when they are.

Edit: The game got an overhaul, and it's better than I hoped. Still no graphs, though <3

This is a unique game. It has a lot going for it, but bare in mind that this is not a game for everybody. What you get here is a vary deep production-chain and population manager. It has long production chains like in the Settler series. For instance just to produce the most basic food product- the seaweed portion you need a ship to bring in the raw sea weed. The shit needs a hangar, and a pilot. The hangar needs a director and a technican to maintain it. Then the seaweed needs to be processed. First you need to fatten the seaweed- for that you need a bioreactor plus a farmer of two. Once the seaweed is fattened you need to dry it, that needs another facility and a operator or two. And then you get the most basic food type. Don't get me even started on bread. And the game is a grind. And that can be disheartening at times. You need to invest a lot time into the game to get anything done. And there is a lot of micromanaging. This game is a micromanagers wet dream. You control everything, every individuals workplace, job, diet. The game is also very atmospheric- if you are into chillout music Stellardrone plays in the soundtrack. I'm having a lot of fun here. It is a breathe of fresh air after simple economic games like Anno. So if you are into micromanagment, complex production chains and you are not pulled off by grinding- thant this is a game for you. If you are looking for a quick, easy game- maybe not so much. There is still much that needs to be implemented to the game for it to truly shine- like disasters or research. But it is already playable and enjoyable and you can see where it is going. I think it is worth supporting in early access.

I've been playing Project Aura for about a year or so now, and this game is a unique game. The goal of Project Aura is to create a self-sustaining city for survivors of a global climate change disaster. Unlike other city-building games, PA emphasizes the administrative side of running a city - foodstocks, medicines, production of fabrication materials to construct buildings, technology to support said buildings, and the logistical planning for put a functional colony together.

As far as city-builders are concerned, PA is a unique experience. The administrative aspect of running a self-sustaining city requires much planning, critical awareness of systems and supplies, and expanding when the need or ability arises to combat various challenges facing the colony. In my opinion, PA provides a futuristic image of the post-human era, with the last vestiges of humanity attempting to survive on a now-hostile planet.

I would whole-heartedly endorse Project Aura, as it provides hours of entertainment and challenge. The developers have worked hard at creating a cohesive, complex, and creative world respelndant with motifs of crisis, resilience, and survival. If you want something different from shooters, rogue-like clones, flights sims, or an RPG, check out Project Aura. There's a great community of people playing this game, so you'll join a corps of colonial directors determined to save humanity!

I have read most of the reviews of this game before I bought it, both positive and negative and must say I was expecting a very unplayable game because of the number of negetive reviews and their vehemence. So I have been most pleasently surprise by the depth and complexity of this game, which is still in it's infancy. If you want a complete game then buy a complete game, this is not, as it says it is an alpha or beta if you prefer and many things don't exist yet. But if you are a patient gamer who likes to see a game grow and want to support a really good City Builder game in a futuristic setting, than this is the game for you. It is my considered opinion that those who have written the negetive reviews don't understand early access and have bad mouthed this game out of fustration, they are entitled to thier opinions but other then the ones who readily admit it is not far along as they though this game is playable and interesting and I would suggests the nay sayers give it another try

This game is fun. I have never written a review before, but I had to just say that the bad rep this game has gotten is unfair. Mainly this game is INCREDIBLY difficult, but if you keep that in mind then you're fine. This issue becomes when you want a simple game that you can check out of quickly. This game makes you micro-manage, you have to understand what things build into, and more than anything else you have to pay attention and READ THE FREAKING DESCRIPTIONS. (I enjoy this game way too much).

Do you like watching lots of arrows advance along tracks that feed into other arrow tracks that then also advance but more slowly? Do you crave punishing difficulty and a fastidious attention to even the most minor detail? Wish EVE: Online was a little more like a spreadsheet? Then Project Aura is for you! You'll spend your first 40 hours in game constantly restarting while learning to farm your colony's poop for enough fertilizer to grow tomatoes in, and if you're lucky, your larder inventory WON'T randomly disappear! All the fun of Hermes Conrad's job- even watching 8 level 1 Recyclers all become level 2! Watch your citizens' morale drop when they realize you haven't stored enough food for them to eat tomorrow, and set yourself the lofty goal of producing a bread- there's like 7 different kinds of grain!

(I know, it's a beta. Be prepared to make your own fun, though, at least for now.)

Banished in Sci-Fi is a good comparison.

Beta 2 is a great city builder/economy simulation. Beta 3 will add research, putting even more emphasis on production optimization, in a resource scarce environment.

This is an Early Release Game, so it's not fully balanced yet, and some of the UI is awkward still.

There is no combat, which is something I appreciate. As an old gamer, I'm tired of having enemies, there are so many other ways to make games challenging and interesting.