Utopia Colony

by Aethyna Aug 23, 2022 | 1 Votes | 73 Played | 0 Reviews

6 rate

Genres:

Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Exploration , Sci-Fi , Space Games

Platforms:

Publishers:

GridSky Software AS Starting with a humble outpost, you’ll need to gather ores, sell them and purchase station upgrades, a brand-new rover, or even add new sections to your outpost while dealing with Mars' harsh environment. You’re not alone on the red planet as well. There are other pioneers on the planet and they may need your help! Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion Disclaimer: Please note that this is an early access review of the game Utopia Colony. It is in no way reflective of the complete game and will definitely be updated to include all significant changes once the game is officially launched.

Summary

Set in the year 2033, Utopia Colony is a sci-fi-themed mining simulator where you play as a sole miner sent to Mars by the Utopia Arura mining corporation. Starting with a humble yet functional outpost, you’ll need to gather ores, sell them and purchase station upgrades, a brand-new rover to make travelling large distances possible, or even add new sections to your outpost. Of course, Mars has a harsh environment and you’ll have to deal with the occasional solar flares and dust storms. Thankfully, you’re not alone on the planet. There are other pioneers on the planet and they may need your help!

Plotline

Unlike some games, Utopia Colony doesn’t start with an introduction, telling you more about the character you are playing as or the situation your character is currently in. However, the game does provide some story snippets that you can find, such as the diary at the deuterium mine and refinery, Rua 51, as well as story details you can glean from conversations with the chattier NPCs at the Utopia Colony itself.

Gameplay

The gameplay loop here in Utopia Colony involves gathering ores from deposits that are often scattered far and wide across the explorable area on Mars. There’s a bit of idle element to mining in this game since there’s really nothing to do while you wait for your character to fill up her backpack with ores.

Once done, you can either deposit the ores directly at the ore deposit box at your base or if you’ve unlocked the rover, you can store your ores in your rover and go back for seconds or thirds… at least until the deposit is depleted and you’ll move on to finding the next deposit. As a simulator, the game is supposed to be realistic, but right off the bat, it does seem weird that your character is gathering these ores using her hands and no visible tools.

Considering that there are many different kinds of ores in this game, it also doesn’t seem to indicate how many of each ore you have in your inventory as well as in your rover or base station storage. Everything’s just lumped up together, that is until you’ve unlocked your first station upgrade and gain a new command terminal that allows you to sell ores on what seems to be an ore-based stock market.

Ore gathering is only one part of the gameplay. Once you have enough cash, you can then spend them to purchase a huge variety of upgrades for both your habitat, your suit, and your rover. You can even expand your outpost area by adding new structures like a greenhouse that is supposed to generate food for your base over time. However, similar to your ore inventory, the game doesn’t detail food and water consumption rates, nor let you know, for example, how much food your greenhouse can produce and after how long.

Note that in Utopia Colony, you’ll need to survive each day by having enough supplies of food and water, which will drain gradually over time. Naturally, you’ll need oxygen from your spacesuit too since you can’t breathe Mars’ air, but that is easily rechargeable every time you hop into your rover or enter your base so it isn’t too much of a hassle to manage. Food and water don’t cost too much to stock up so as long as you remember to top up your food and water levels every time you before you head out to explore, you should be fine.

Besides upgrades, you can also purchase deployable extractor or mining rigs to passively generate ores or, if you can find the deposits, water. However, to deploy these rigs, you’ll need a carry-all rover, which can be pretty costly. Rigs use power as well and you’ll need to make sure your base is generating enough of them to power all your rigs. However, I still couldn’t figure out why, despite purchasing additional solar panels, my power level seems to be dropping rather than increasing. The game also doesn’t show you how much power a rig is using and tell you how much power will a solar panel provide you. It’s all very vague.

Exploration is a key gameplay aspect here in Utopia Colony. Mars is a rather big planet after all and the area you are confined to explore is pretty massive. Unfortunately, the Mars landscape is very barren… perhaps too barren making lengthy drives in the rover, which is required of you often, incredibly dull.

It would definitely be good to have a fast travel option for discovered locations, but if the devs wanted to keep the driving requirement as it is in the name of realism, then they will need to make the drive more interesting. Maybe in the form of interesting podcasts like what Glitchhikers did? Or they could add in more interesting points-of-interests (POIs) along the drive like interesting stone formations, caves, or mysterious structures, or maybe a deceased pioneer who was unretrieved by his colleagues with some story snippets in the form of notes in his pockets? Better yet, make the rover move a lot faster than its current fastest speed so as to cut down on the time spent just driving across barren landscapes.

Of course, being a planet with some harsh environments, you’ll have to deal with some environmental events, from periodic dust storms which will disrupt your view and GPS, essentially making you drive blind, to high-radiation solar flares where you’ll then be asked to head to the old deuterium mining facility, Rua 51, to weather it out and wait until the radiation level returned to normal before heading out again.

For a game that focuses on exploration, however, Utopia Colony seems to only have a mini-map and a compass bar at the top of the screen. It would have been so much more convenient had the player have access to a proper full-screen gridded map with POIs like the utopia colony, Rua 51, the Rover, and others marked out. The player should also be given the option to mark out interesting locations on the map too, to indicate the location of a yet-to-be-depleted deposit, for instance.

Now, I don’t think you can die from falling in this game – there’s just no high enough height for you to jump down from, but you can die from running out of the essentials. Personally, I haven’t died yet – I’m a careful player – but I reckon that if it happens, you can probably just load a last save and continue from there instead. Due to this, it’s probably wise to save often.

Likely due to still being in development, Utopia Colony also has some bugs that kind of ruin some aspects of the game. For instance, I was able to pick up a mission from a list from the commander at the Utopia Colony to collect some Moga fruits from the “garden” nearby. Once I took the mission, the rest greyed out, so I thought I had to complete them one by one.

Finding the fruits themselves is incredibly tedious due to having no obvious indicators that the fruits are there among the undergrowth at least until you’re very close to them. So basically, you’ll have to manually run around the patch of dessert forest in a similar way as what a a rescue team will do to search for missing trekkers in the jungle, but obviously, in the latter scenario, they have more people to cover a larger area.

Now, that’s not the bug though. The bug showed up when I returned to the commander with no idea how many fruits I’ve collected – I’ve lost count - and how many fruits more, if any, that I still need. Instead of showing me my progress or letting me know that I haven’t completed my mission yet, the same mission list as before popped up and the Accept button for all the missions seems clickable and not greyed out. Tried taking the same mission as I did before and nothing happened. The mission list just froze. Switching to other missions doesn’t work either. So essentially, the mission’s bugged and it doesn’t seem like I can complete it.

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics here look really good, simulating what the surface of the planet Mars would look like well. Personally, I really liked the rover design and how all the locations look in this game.

In terms of sound, the game features a techno-like music that plays in the background in a loop interspersed with moments of dead silence. The game also features voice acting. Your main character, for instance, will constantly repeat a few phrases every 30 seconds whenever a solar flare is detected. In a way, it’s fairly annoying. The voice acting for the one other character in the game, the medic at the colony, isn’t very good. The voice actor sounds so unnatural, like she’s reading from an essay and not from a dialogue script! In the game, she’s supposed to be interacting with the player, but it sure doesn’t sound like it. Her accent is also very strong. Being Asian myself, even I had trouble hearing what she is saying at times. Thankfully, there are subtitles in the game.

Conclusion

Not every Early Access title is ready for release (yet) and Utopia Colony is definitely one of those games. In addition to the occasional glitch, it could definitely use more content; more polish for the writing, voice acting, animation, etc; more explanation as to how things work; as well as more detailed tooltips and crucial data that the player can then use to decide which upgrades to get first, However, the core game concept shows promise as a solid Mars “mining” simulator, and if you’re into niche simulators, you’ll want to keep this game on your radar!

New Game Added: Utopia Colony

by Aethyna Aug 23, 2022

Starting with a humble outpost, you’ll need to gather ores, sell them and purchase station upgrades, a brand-new rover, or even add new sections to your outpost while dealing with Mars' harsh environment. You’re not alone on the red planet as well. There are other pioneers on the planet and they may need your help!