I have a feeling this might be the shortest review I’ve ever written. The current subject of my attention is Colonials Programme, a rather simplistic resource management and colony sim game developed and published by CookieLegends. The campaign of Colonials Programme is divided into individual missions with various objectives. In each mission, you’re presented with a grid of tiles upon which you’re expected to harvest resources and build a functioning space colony. You start each mission with a small amount of the materials you’ll need to build machines to harvest more of these resources.

In turn, your buildings will provide things like power, food, water, and oxygen that your colonists need to survive. Keeping all your colonists alive is your number one priority, since you’ll instantly fail the current mission if any of them happen to die for any reason. To keep things running smoothly, you’ll need to ensure that each machine you build is connected to efficient power and resource grids. If you place your buildings carefully, you’ll ensure that they have all the power and material they need to perform at their best. Thus, logic dictates that things won’t go well if you place buildings haphazardly.

You’ll start each mission with an “AI core” placed somewhere on the tile grid. This core doesn’t consume any resources and passively provides electricity to a couple of tiles next to it. Therefore, it is intended to be the starting point for your power and resource grids. As you might expect, you ideally want to produce as much of each resource with as few machines as possible. That’s partially because most machines you can build pollute the environment over time. If you don’t build vacuums to keep pollution in check, the resource costs for maintaining all your buildings will rapidly increase.

Some resources you can extract can be combined to form new materials. This brings me to the first item on my list of things I dislike about Colonials Programme. Each in-game resource has a “unique” name, but then has its real-world name attached to it in parentheses. Colonials Programme lists its resources as follows: “Horm (steel),” “Keda (soot),” “Ikat (coal),” “Inda (iron),” “Tsa (sand),” “Hez (moisture),” “Lan (seed),” “Lioa (oil).” I think this naming scheme does nothing but introduce potential ways players can become confused. I don’t see why Colonials Programme assigned two names to each of its resources.

If Colonials Programme’s developers wanted to use more fantastical names, that’s fine, but they should have fully stuck with either that naming scheme or real-world terms. Using both names — especially with one tacked on in parentheses, as though added as an afterthought — just strikes me as strange, confusing, and ultimately unnecessary. Secondly, the camera angle at which you view the tile grid in each mission isn’t ideal. The odd camera angle, combined with my total lack of depth perception, often causes me to disrupt my power and resource networks by placing buildings on different tiles than I intended.

Granted, that might only affect players with potentially uncommon eyesight issues, such as myself. Nonetheless, that still presents an accessibility concern that Colonials Programme’s developers should have considered. I’ve also noticed a fair few minor mistakes in terms of spelling and grammar within Colonials Programme’s in-game text. For example, Colonials Programme’s tutorials frequently use “it’s” in contexts where “its” is grammatically correct. These same tutorials also misspell “maintenance” as “mantainance.” I know pointing out this issue in particular is becoming a hallmark of my reviews, but I’ll keep harping on about it until thorough proofreading becomes standard practice among game developers.

If you enjoy colony sim games and/or resource management games with simplistic core gameplay loops, you might well get your money’s worth out of Colonials Programme. Personally, though, I can’t recommend going out of your way to buy Colonials Programme at full price, even if you’re an absolute fanatic when it comes to games of this ilk. The only circumstance in which I can potentially recommend Colonials Programme in good conscience is if you happen to find it decently discounted. Even in that case, however, I know Steam offers tons of comparatively more appealing options for fans of these genres.

A PC review key for Colonials Programme was provided by CookieLegends for this review.

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Colonials Programme

$9.99

4.5

Score

4.5/10

Pros

• Simplistic gameplay.
• Straightforward mission objectives.

Cons

• The camera angle can make gameplay needlessly difficult.
• Redundant, potentially confusing resource naming scheme.
• Minor spelling and grammatical errors.