Autonauts [Review]

By this point, it’sfairly common knowledge that I enjoy a good colony game that let’sme exploit a dislocated population for my own means. When I wasplaying Surviving Mars—let me check my notes—I established acolony using robot labor only for it to be consumed by alienanomalies. Alright, minor set back there. So then we went on to Siegeof Centauri, where a colony was established outside of the solarsystem only to be consumed by alien anomalies. Well...I’m reallyfeeling good about playing Autonauts then. A resource managementcolony game where you use a robotic labor force to create a colonydeveloped by Denki and published by Curve Digital let’s see if Ican establish a colony that won’t be consumed by alien anomalies!

Gameplay

The game revolvesaround automation. Everything that your initial builder robot can dowith your instruction, you can program others to take over and do foryou. Eventually at any rate. The game gradually scales your nextrequirements, requiring you to discover new technologies to improveyour robots, letting you expand on your automation. The goal of thegame is to eventually make a fully self sustained colony where theneeds of your colonists are handled by your ever present roboticworkforce. You won’t, at first, be able to just get away with afew robots however. As each robot in the start of the game can onlyhandle simple tasks due to their incredibly small memory and eachtask or repeat instruction eats through your memory quickly.

Graphics

Normally graphicsdon’t matter to much to me with any game that I play like this. Solong as things are a step up beyond a blob of color, it gets a passfrom me. So when I loaded up this game it was a bit jarring to seethe rather “cutesy” and “simplistic” art style that thedevelopers had chosen for this game. But it oddly enough works forwhat they’re doing. Items and creatures are easily identifiedregardless of how far out I managed to zoom the screen. Even theground textures makes identifying the difference between an irondeposit and a coal deposit easy. So while the game might not win anygraphic awards, they still achieve the goal of me being able to pointat a random section of the map and instantly know what resources aregoing to be there.

Review

With any resourcegame, there are the standard gating mechanics before you can rise tothe next level. In the beginning, it doesn’t take long to startmaking an automated lumber group. It also doesn’t take long beforeyou realize you have a workforce of two dozen robots, just tomaintain a small tree farm. Thankfully, the gate to get past this oneis relatively easy, just make a small apple farm to create colonistsand…okay, so it’s the same problem, just doubled but once you’repast that you get to build better robots that are faster and can domore tasks each.

Which you’re goingto need, since in order to properly exploit these humans colonistsyou grow them fresh from embryos and they’re completely incapableof caring for themselves in any capacity...oh dear god, this backfired quickly. This is the point where the game really feels like itbogs down the hardest and where I realized that I didn’t have astrong enough infrastructure in order to progress quickly through thegame. But like most of these games, they’re all learningexperiences where you improve for the next time you play.

If you’re a fan ofgames like Factoria, but you don’t like to have to handle thethreat of constant alien anomalies nomming on your tech, then thisgame is definitely up your alley. Given that the only real gatingmechanism is how much work you’re willing to put into your colony.It’s available on Steam and for the asking price it has a lot ofreplayability so it’s well worth the money. Oh, and if you’rewondering how I deal with any anomalies that this game might throw atme, I’ve contracted security out to these fellows.

I feel really goodabout this decision.