Разработчик: Colonial Life
Описание
“Colonisation failed… Un-aesthetic environment played a pivotal role.
The colony survived nearly seven years before a serial killer claimed her first victims, thirteen more soon followed. After she was caught, and publicly killed, there was a spate of copycat killers. Scared people turned to charismatic cult leaders and mass suicides soon followed. Violence erupted everywhere and society broke down. Soon after, a suicide bomber wiped out the remaining infrastructure of the colony hub and the remaining colonists perished during a harsh winter.”
Enter the brutal world of colony prospecting.
You fly from planet to planet, laboriously scanning them to assess their habitability, and to rootle out their secrets.
This one is toxic and has no water. This one has a god-like being unwilling to share. This one has no resources. This one has giant sand-worms. This one has crushing gravity… yet it also has fresh water lakes, and enough resources to take a colony to space-age tech. There’s food here too, strange fruits growing on thorny trees. A 67% chance of colonisation. You send down a pod.
“Colonisation success… Earth has sent your payment. You’ve unlocked Bio Research Colony Pods and Physics Station Pods.”
You’re on your way back to Earth to restock colony pods and surface probes. A Groshvwi Colony Ship blocks your jump-path. You open fire with your lasers, enhanced through setting up a military colony. You destroy the ship. From it’s wreckage you find materials for crafting specialist pods.
At Earth you restock your colony pods: 3 standard pods, a physics pod, a prison pod, and another military one. You apply to take a tourism pod but Earth refuses. They only allow prospectors to set up tourism colonies once they’ve discovered a Gaia World.
You fly from planet to planet, tirelessly scanning them to assess their habitability, and to hunt down their treasures.
This one is terrible, no air, no water. This one is already colonised by the A.I. You attempt to hack the colony and fail, they fire at your ship and your engines take damage. You fly on. This one has high-functioning apes, but they are peaceful. The air is slightly toxic, but there is water and food. Resources only take the colony to industrial era tech but Earth is still willing to pay. A 72% chance of colonisation. You send down a standard pod.
“Colonisation failed…
Perhaps it was inevitable. Within twelve years of the colony being established the native apes began to learn from the colonists. First to use tools, and then how to communicate. In the thirtieth year they learned how to kill. At first, they began attacking in small groups, testing the colonies defences. Soon after, they launched an attack with hundreds of thousands of apes and overwhelmed the colony. They killed thousands of the colonists and enslaved the rest. Perhaps, fortunately for the colonists, they all died in captivity after contracting a venereal disease from the native apes."
Features:
- Infinite planets to scan and explore.
- Ironman mode
- 40 thousand words of descriptive text.
- 20 different colony types to unlock and establish each offering different bonuses.
- Crafting system.
- Gas-giant mining.
- Random encounters.
- Space music
Who should buy this:
- Gamers who don’t need a detailed story.
- Gamers who enjoy calming, repetitive tasks, and reading.
- Gamers who need a challenge.
- Gamers who don’t mind failing.
- Gamers who enjoy Nethack-esque games.
- Gamers who like to work some things out for themselves.
What else does this have:
- A background universe – There are three races in the galaxy trying to colonise it. None on friendly terms. Earth starts off way behind. It is possible, though ridiculously difficult (really, so, so fracking hard) to catch up and even begin eliminating the enemy. All of this is done through establishing colonies. Every colony you set up speeds up Earth’s growth. Setting up military colonies and other specialist ones can slow the enemies. At the very least, the one screen that handles this background universe can be screenshot for bragging rights!?!
- Missions – there are things you can try to accomplish in the universe, like finding the 20 statues dedicated to the mysterious First Empire. None are compulsory though.
- No limit caps – there is no cap on how much you can do. You can, should you choose, set up a hundred military colonies (which boost your lasers each time) and eventually be able to take on A.I Battleships, but you'll probably die or get bored first!!
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 (32bit/64bit)
- Processor: Intel Core2 Duo or better
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000, Nvidia GeForce 8000, ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Mac
- OS: Mac OSX 10.10 or better
- Processor: Intel Core2 Duo or better
- Memory: 2 MB RAM
- Graphics: Compatible OpenGLR
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Linux
- OS: Ubuntu or equivalent
- Processor: 1.2 GHz
- Memory: 2 MB RAM
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Отзывы пользователей
Relaxing, easy game. Good idea, but gets repetitive fast. Basically visit a planet, scan, decide if it is worthwhile to colonise, if so, terraform and colonise. Somewhat challenge to obtain different colony types, nothing to see after that.
Recommendable for the price.
While this is a very simple game, if you remember and enjoy some of the old go and explore, find things and get a reward games, this you will enjoy.
Basic, simple and easy to play.
It starts out very nice and interesting, but after a while it becomes a bick of a grinding click-fest, as you just go from planet to planet hoping to find statues for the church mission, or traders to get more advanced colonies. Still, for this price, and especially when it's on sale, worth a few hours of casual fun.
Game doesn't look like much, but it's a fun casual, several step above most things you'll find on IOS. As a time waster, this is one I'll come back to.
You travel around the galaxy, surveying worlds for potential colonization. Each successful colony provide you with the resources and funds to continue doing it, until you are able to fulfill a questlist of benchmarks. The process of doing all this is surprisingly more involved than you might think, and getting beyond the first hour quickly learned me that this title is more than just a quick cashgrab. For its price, it's well worth it.
Quite some repetition and grinding too in this game - and still a lot of fun, if you are not the impatient type of a player. For me this game is relaxing and interesting at the same time. There is a lot to discover. Progress is slow but rewarding. Later on you are even able to shoot down the nasty pirate and even alien ships and gain valuable loot from them XD
Grafics and sound are not overwhelming, to say the least, but still support the gameplay and athmosphere well enough imo.
I got enough of fun and playtime for my money, so i can easily recommend this game.
It is playable, but like others mentioned, it is a clicking fest.
Improvement to the interface is required to reduce the amount of clicking and increase the amount of playing. For example, instead of buring engineering items, why not also include a "repair all" button on earth?
Your ship should automatically equip a colony module if it has none when it reaches Earth. It would save at least one click... and in this game, every less clicks is a plus.
I would remove the random hostile encounters or at least give use several ways to avoid the encounter or it becoming hostile (with no randomness on success please).
It is also shallow. There is not much to do other than clicking. The designer needs to add more muscle to his game.
There are tons of English mistakes and OBVIOUS typos. The designer/tranductor needs to reread himself.
I have played better games that were free on Kongregate, so seeing this at its current price is something I would not recommand paying.
Until the game has more muscle, the linguistic mistakes corrected and the interface improved, I cannot recommand this game.
Honestly just buy this. Sparkbomber's sum up is spot on and I really have nothing more to add to it. If you want a laid back game for a fairly cheap price go for this one. I'm still diggin though the game and will probably edit this once I've hit the bottom. So far though I keep playing it.
Too poor. But cheap.
Colony Prospector is perfect for anyone who wants something to do but doesn't have much time! You can pick up the game, dive right in, and go when you need to.. I wasn't so absorbed into the game that I couldn't walk away. You'll be killin time before you know it!
Gameplay
You're the pilot of a colony space vessel and it's your job to colonize as many planets as you can. You will constantly warp from planet to planet in search of desireable conditions to start new colonies. Planets present variable challenges for your colony. Planets may range from Plutonian to Venusian temperature, Super Gravity to little gravity, variable amounts of food, water, and resources as well as challenges, and other little goodies. When a colony is successfully established, after 50 years of hypersleep, you'll be rewarded with obtanium (the main currrency).
Obtanium can be used to purchase prospecting rights, different gas elements for crafting, items to improve planetary living conditions, and more. Eventually, you'll unlock the advanced colony pods providing unique rewards other than Obtanium. Each advanced colony type also offers unique trading opportunities.
I'm not sure if an end-game is possible considering alien colonies are in the tens of thousands or more.
Sounds
I'm not a fan of the sound effects, maybe because there's only 10 different effects to listen to but the music is pretty cool. I found that the music seems to change a little too often.. everytime you warp from planet to planet the song changes. The space themed music fits this game perfectly and it's not bad even if it's repetitive.
Aesthetics
Visually, the planets are the best part. All of the planets are very colorful and easy on the eyes, they're also cool to look at because everything else is basically empty space. The inside area of the spaceship is ok and it helps to choose a nicer design once you've unlocked a few. I don't really care so much for the planet sectors because the artwork seems like only half of it is there. There's an image of small rocks that'll appear from time to time and it just feels empty.
Things that bug me
Once I got into a rythem of successfully building colonies, I found that I had no need to craft most of the things in the game. I could just buy what I needed because it seemed cheaper to buy everything. Once in a while I'd need to craft crucial blueprints to advance, but that's it.
There's a dozen or so bugs in the game that kinda ruins the experience.. Nutti-Meals needs to be looked at again AND it uses an Atmospheric MK3 when it shouldn't.. that's a costly loss. Hacking Language #V needs a look at too. Some of these items use other items when they shouldn't or they don't use any item at all but still award the intended effect.
Planets with "Crushing Gravity" need to go a little easier on the Prison Colonies. I spent maybe 4 hours trying to make 1 Prison Colony survive and these planets don't appear often enough to let a 95% survival rate die..
Constructing the Groshvwi Colony let's me construct an AI Colony too and vice versa. That threw me off for hours as I tried searching for any materials to reconstruct these colonies. Once those materials are used, they don't show as a craftable option anymore.
The colony deathbomb weapon randomly appeared somewhere in a colony and I'm not sure why or how.. it appeared after I flew to a bookmarked colony. It also doesn't reduce qty after use.
And when I'm searching with the surveyor drones there's a "flavor text" that reveals a mineral vein with gold. The colony should also produce gold if this happens. JUST SAYING..
Overall
Colony Prospector is a decent little game. There's some areas of the game needing immediate attention but it's not pointlessly game-breaking. I'd say the game is worth the $5 price tag but if it's on sale for less, snatch it up if you're the type who enjoys repetition in space.
fun little game, for a while. Then everything gets repetitive. I mean everything after the first 30 mins of game play i saw nothing new except for unlocking the designs for new colony types. I'd highly recommend adding a few dozen or more terrain types, even if they are no different from each other than in its descriptive text. Finding the exact same life forms on every other planet just destroys immersion, and uhm well im sure you can think of more than 1 way to say sorry nothing here.
That said game plays well for whats there, and there is plenty of room for grinding and unlocking some stuff if you can keep from being bored to death, or shot to death by the over powered pirates and aliens. I bought this game because it reminded me of something I played along time ago on a Tandy 1000. Sadly that game from 30 years ago had more depth than this.
A cool little concept of a game, excellent graphics given the resources used to create it. A challenging but not complicated one. Though most would see every planet design within 3 hours of gameplay. Only knock I have against it is simply could add more random events like asteroid fields. Rating: 7/10
General:
Rating: E
Price: $4.99
Genre: Strategy, Simulation
Time played: 12.1 hours
You’re job is to find planets that can be colonized. There’s super beings and aliens and AI to contend with and good ol’ hostile environments.
Gameplay: 6
You’re one of the few, the elite a Colony Prospector! In this glamorous job you travel around, look at planets, scan the sectors of the planet and then if you can send down a colony pod, more on those later. The chances of your colony prospering vary per planet, but at the time of this writing I had managed to colonize 100+ planets, it doesn’t tell you how many times you failed though.
You have to buy claims to prospect areas from planet Earth. The prices and amounts change also the chances of habitable planets, gaia worlds and a bunch of other factors. Then you can jump through a wormhole provided at a small (or large) fee from Earth. The only free wormhole jumps are to Earth. The jump costs vary each time you jump so have to figure the cost of the jumps into how much money you currently have. There is 1 area that has 10 free claims but it is a very hostile area; lots of aliens and people trying to rob you.
But once you actually get to a planet your ship will do an initial scan, it will reveal some basic info on the planet, the type, if it has an atmosphere things of that nature. Then you can zoom into the planet and there are 12 sectors and it will give you a break down of Gravity, Climate, and Atmosphere. There’s also Food, Water and Tech Level, these will change depending on what your sector scans reveal.
Once you scan the sectors you’ll get a description of what the drone has found. Sometimes food, water or resources (tech level) other times there’s extra payments from earth or other colonies for various things. You have to scan all 12 sectors, there sometimes can be a sector on the moon as well, and then you can decide to try to colonize the planet. Your ship will send down the selected colony pod and you enter hyper sleep (i think the ship supplies the colony power for 50 years or something) and wake up later to see if the colony succeeded, if so you get your payment if not nothing. Depending on the type of colony they will give you extra money and possibly an item to help you in further colonizing.
At the time of this writing, I have unlocked all but 2 types of colony pods. The AI pod and Church pods. I won’t tell you how to get the rest, that’s part of the game.
Also there’s plenty of ways to make a “detrimental” planet “habitable”, I won’t tell you those either. Part of this game is figuring things out. There’s not much of a tutorial or playing instructions.
Story: N/A
You are working off some debt or something by finding new planets to colonize.
Graphics: 4
They are there, it’s not super exciting, but they aren’t bad either? They fit the game and don’t make it bad or good.
Controls: N/A
Everything is done through mouse/keyboard. Actually Mouse by itself will work, but you can use the space bar for lots of stuff to, for instance scanning sectors, click on the sector with the mouse, then press spacebar to confirm your selection. That’s really it.
Repeatability: 3
At first it was interesting reading the various things that happen when you scan a sector, but then after about 2 hours they start repeating. So by that time i’m just pressing space or clicking the mouse to hurry up and see if i get things I need to colonize the planet. 12 hours in I’ve almost finished finding all the various colony pods and after I finish that not sure if i’ll keep playing. The game is basically a time vampire, though it can be relaxing.
Music: 10
The music blends well with the game, I barely noticed it was there and when I did pay attention to me it fit the game very well.
Difficulty: 3
Maybe a little bit difficult at the beginning, once you start figuring things out (also not difficult) it becomes easier. Once you’re far enough that you have the money, you can colonize just about any planet using the various items you can find/buy/craft.
Multiplayer: N/A
Single player game. I suppose someone could watch over your shoulder?
Initial Thoughts:
4.99? That’s not bad, I’ll pick it up seems as though it could be fun.
Hey i’m starting to get the hang of this and i’ve unlocked some new colony pods, I’m the greatest! Wait it’s been 4 hours? Hmm.
Soma Says:
This is a.. .decent game. I mean I recommend playing it, but only to people who enjoy repetitive tasks. There’s almost no tutorial, no info online due to the game coming out only a few weeks ago. There are a few bugs, none are game breaking but they are a little annoying. And after a while I did get annoyed with clicking then spacebar over and over.
Sometimes when jumping to a new planet you’ll get attacked by aliens or AI or even humans. At first I couldn’t even damage them and realized that all you have to do is just jump away. A few will block wormhole travel and you have to attack them until you can jump away or destroy them.
Here’s where it gets wonky, I thought for sure i would die, my shields are gone they attack again and now i’m at -61% of Hull. Wait. -61? Is.. is that possible? Apparently so. I let them continue attacking me got several of my sections (Hull, Engines, Drone Launcher) to a negative number. Finally jumped away. I’m still not dead? Okay… Then used repair kits. Yup have to repair -61 to get to 0, then 100 more to full repair them.
Again not game breaking flaws/bugs but just odd. Also let’s say you use a 10% repair to fix something at 50%. After it’s done i’m at 67%, I’m not genius but that doesn’t add up. Oh and sometimes you’ll find things through scanning like extra food or an extra payment from earth and it will lower the total payment or Food readout.
All in all, it’s a good time waster, but very, very repetitive. Some might even call it tedious.
If you enjoyed the review please check out my curator page ---> https://store.steampowered.com/curator/28849369/
Update:
Recently tried to play this again. It looks like they have added a tutorial which explains how the system works and such. However the game is still very very repetitive. Still worth checking out and trying if you're into that type of thing.
This game is soooo cool. I absolutely love the concept and its very more-ish....just going to finish this batch of claims, then I'll go to sleep, for real this time.....
As I work through the discoveries and quests, I find myself wanting more. More of this, more pods more civilizations more planet things...more, please.
Basically, you find planets, and scan them, and if suitable, fix them up and plonk colonists on it, and are rewarded with monies to buy things - things that improve your ship, make fixing up planets easier, or allow you to craft various things...so you can go colonize more planets.
The click click click does get a bit of repetitive after you've made your first 50 colonies or so, perhaps a suggestion to discover tech to upgrade scanning drones that can do multiple sectors at once is an idea ...earn your convenience! Same thing with the using many 5-10% kits to repair really damaged infrastructure, a way to do this in build would be a nice quality of life feature. I'd like to see more bookmarks too, perhaps a way to rename planets (though the names some of them come up with are hilarious). So yeah, some convenience things aren't there, but its still really fun.
I'd absolutely buy a sequel or expansion to this. Please make more.
Good but buggy
A fun game, not without flaws though
Colony Prospector is a game that just popped into my discovery cue today. Completely unexpected, but given the low price and frankly because the premise intrigued me, I bought it. With 2+ hours on the clock, I reckon I can give some impression of what it is and why you should buy it, or not. Emphasis on this choice, since you'll either love the game or loathe it.
The premise in a nutshell is that you are a titular colony prospector, aka a guy/girl who visits unexplored worlds, terraforms them and then plunks down a colony module. 50 years of hypersleep later, you'll either have a functional colony, or a smoking hole in the planet. Note that you only get paid if the colony is successful, and that the amount of pay that you get is dependent on a number of factors as explained later on. Sometimes you need to deal with unfriendly natives, sometimes with alien AI's or space pirates. Kind of random, though the further away you stray from earth, the more likely they will appear.
Terraforming and on-planet discoveries
Every planet you visit can be a Gas Giant (uninhabitable), Rock world (hard to make hospitable) or an Atmospheric planet (Yay colonies). When you get to one, your ship will scan it and give you an indication of how (in)hospitable the world is, if some specific hazard is present and so on. A grid with several locations (Gas clouds for Gas Giants) will show and you need to send a drone to each (only for habitable worlds) to explore them.
Sometimes you'll find needed things such as water, food and resources, sometimes nothing. Sometimes you will discover a hazard, or a boon that directly affects how habitable the world is. Sometimes you'll find ruins of lost civilizations and get sellable artifacts, a free terraforming unit or useable items. Sometimes you'll find an ancient being who may or may not help you (some find colonists tasty) or a rival colonising the world. AI colonists need to be hacked or nuked fyi, and the hacking is difficult.
After checking all locations (moons optional, need to select them), you can get a good idea of how habitable a world is, as is. Then you need to decide if its worth chancing it (higher is better), or if you need to expend some items to boost the living conditions. These can be climate-changing items (2 grades), items that beget water from the atmosphere (plural), gravity adjusting ones and so on. My advice is to go for 95%, don't waste items after that. Then choose which type of colony to place. Regular colonies and some others allow you to purchase resources after while Prison colonies just give you a bit more money and an injunction to skedaddle. Rince and repeat.
The engine, graphics and sounds
Okay, colour me impressed. Thoroughly. You'd hardly notice, but Colony Prospector runs on RPGMaker MV apparently, The save system, some sound effects and parts of the graphics are unmistakably RPGM material, but the game plays like a '90's space/exploration game with mouse functionality. The planets are custom graphics, as is the ship's bridge. But the locations and later colonies on worlds are largely (modified) town/castle/etc. sprites. And the colony leader heads definitely were made in MV. If you've ever fiddled with any RPGM engine you'll spot it too.
Still, the game doesn't feel like a standard jrpg/scifi. Rather, the closest I can come is a mix between Utopia and Uncharted Waters 2: You have graphics, resources and the lot, but most of action and such is in the descriptions. Yes, text based, thus requiring you to use your imagination when the giant eyeball monster asks to be left alone. Aside from slow animations when using an item, the game runs smoothly and the music is nice. Also, you can save a number of colonies for revisiting them later.
Is it great then?
Can't end the review without addressing the less fun aspects, as this game does have them. Frankly, I reckon most of these could be fixed, if the team makes the effort. But I can get why they'd turn some folks off, so here you have them:
Frankly, the medieval and weird stock materials in MV do not lend themselves well to the scifi setting and should be replaced. As mentioned, some soundeffects are stock as well and don't fit either. The game is pushing the engine hard, I'm not sure how much more can be added in terms of plugins. While there is a good number of planetary backdrops, you will see them all in 2 hours.A lot of events/locations are repeated across several dozen worlds and it was by blind luck that I figured out the little orb meant a clickable moon can be explored. A manual is definitely missing with this game, making it a bit hard on new players to grasp everything. Again, the moons. Not a clue till I clicked it. Lastly, there's a ton of textual errors present. Ben instead of been, hyperslep and so on.
Final Verdict
Pro's
- Nearly unrecognisable as an RPGMaker MV game
- Unique planets to explore
- Nice music
- 1990's charm
- Definitely prods the imagination
- Great potential
Cons
- Stock materials don't mesh with the rest
- Repeated scenes
- Textual errors
- Needs a manual, pronto!
[*]Some parts of the UI are very, very small. I may need glasses, but gimme a break plz.
Verdict
In a nutshell, I'll have to call this a gem in the rough. It shows what can be done with RPGM MV and ingenuity and it definitely ticks the LIKE box with me. It will need some polishing though, as some aspects detract from what it otherwise a great game. No, it's not Elite: Dangerous, it doesn't pretend to be. It just is a very enjoyable little game and definitely worth the asking price. As is. If they polish it, who knows?
Fun game for murdering time.
Pro:
Relaxing
Good Music
Challenging
Ironman
Con:
Very Hard (I like but not for some)
Strange sfx
No instruction on how to unlock all colony
- Fly to a new planet
- Click through all 12 fields on the planet. You can choose to ignore that but I can't find any reason for that except to avoid clicking which you have to do a lot (and I see no justification for so much clicking).
- If you really want this planet you can throw in a few tech items to terraform it to good conditions and try to colonize it.
- Gather your reward after colonization and move on to the next planet.
- Occasionally be attacked by space pirates which you can't defeat, just retreat after taking much damage.
- Add tons of clicking in all windows on top of that.
That's basically the whole game.
I really like the idea and I'd really love to play it more but it's too repetitive and I have too little influence on what happens during the game. Very nice event descriptions but I quickly became bored to read them.
Ok-ish but definitely not the best UI on top of that.
For the price, this is pretty cool!
The UI leaves something to be desired in spots. Like for some reason you have to hit enter on the keyboard to confirm engineering when everything else can be done with the mouse. And there's some typos here and there. And the tutorial doesn't really explain everything, like that you have to unlock the other colony pods, I only stumbled across that in the quests screen. It feels a little early-access-ish, but it just came out and maybe there will be some polishing patches.
BUT, for 5 bucks (three on sale right now), it's a really chill little "wander around the universe" game where you scan planets and maybe terraform them a little, and put down colonies to make more money to buy more stuff. And then occasionally you can like, use something called THE WORLDTAKER to basically a kill a sentinet planet and use its neuro network to build a really good colony and that kind of makes me feel like a monster, and that's fun. And I guess I could bomb the colonies that the other alien races set up if I ever find the stuff to do that?
If this was priced higher, it would be hard to recommend, to be honest, but there's a lot there for cheap and so far it's been a really relaxing little game to chill out with while I watch tv or listen to a podcast. So, thumbs up.
Игры похожие на Colony Prospector
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Colonial Life |
| Платформы | Windows, Mac, Linux |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 20.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 83% положительных (18) |