Project AURA

Game was abandoned, as per this post from developers: https://steamcommunity.com/app/305940/discussions/0/3002173313616732353/ Store page shows banner proclaiming: "NEW UPDATE AVAILABLE; VERSION 1.1" Version 1.1 was released May 31, 2018

Abandonware.

Take any dictionary, look up the word [h1]disappointment[/h1] and you will be redirected to this game's Steam shop page. [list] [*]Graphics look fine. [*]It does seem to have a decent complexity, once you wrap your head around it, but… [*]… what keeps you from that, however, is the very badly explained tutorial. The challenge should come from mastering the game or from campaign goals – not from trying to learn the basics from incomplete commands in sometimes incorrect English. [*]The UI is even worse: It's tiny without an option to adjust that. The windows just pile on top of each other cluttering the screen when you have to drag and drop stuff between windows and the play area – the devs basically dismissed this problem by gatekeeping "playing it on full HD", which is a di[b][/b]ck move, since a lot of people don't have the option to do that. I get it: They had a vision - but dismissing and shaming your player base is not how you get your product to be appreciated... [*]Last but not least: The unrealistic climate collapse scenario it plays in is just pure cringe. [/list] These glaring issues and some others kept me from enjoying it enough to try it for more than one hour, before I…

The game has allot going for it....some ideas I've never seen before....but...and it's a big but.....who in the world makes a city builder that does not allow saving during the campaign. This makes zero sense. I realize that this is an older game...but really. The game feels like it was produced by some talented programmers that aren't actually gamers. I wonder if the Dev's will ever come out with the new game they mention a couple of years ago. EDIT: I've changed my review to recommended. I'm 49 hours in and still enjoying the game (although it is frustrating at times) so I feel the developers deserve a better review. I've definitely gotten my moneys worth. EDIT #2 - i'm 143 hours into this game....please send help.

Mild recommend, with caveats. TLDR: unbalanced and bad UI, but potentially enjoyable at its core. The game is currently $2.99. If you can grab it for that, it's worth a few hours. Don't pay full price because it's not a finished game and you can certainly tell. For 2.99 you'd be getting a semi-competent resource management game with colony mechanics. Not so much a colony or city builder, in the sense that you never see any people-- your workers are just units, just another resource. If you approach it from there, there's actually a quite a lot of things to build and work towards. Unfortunately it's been left in a pretty unbalanced state. There are several bottlenecks in both research and producing the rarest resources. There's a very extensive food/cooking system that's interesting but it's literally impossible to take advantage of high-end recipes, as they rely on farms, which inexplicably consume research points on an ongoing basis-- but then research is also capped (by 'innovation points,' which aren't explained and idk how to get more)... so you can't actually produce enough to keep all the farms going. Therefore you can't have all complex food products on your menu, a…

This game is graphically interesting, but the play experience was dull and not sufficiently engaging for me to be able to relax and enjoy it.