Commodore User


Colony

Categories: Review: Software
Author: Tony Hetherington
Publisher: Bulldog
Machine: Commodore 64

 
Published in Commodore User #46

Colony

By the beginning of the 21st Century, the Earth is desperately overpopulated and so man has colonised other worlds. Most of these planets are either cold, bleak or generally unpleasant. The one you are on is cold, bleak, unpleasant and packed with chomping aliens!

You are a maintenance droid with more than a passing resemblance to a beetle and it's your job to harvest the mushrooms that the colony is supposed to grow, plant the seeds to grow more mushrooms and protect the colony from the continuous alien onslaught.

The aliens come in just two forms of insect (beetle and wasp) but despite a lot of frantic flapping, neither seem to fly. The aliens' main aim in life is to eat anything, and immediately set to work on your fences and then the mushrooms themselves. They can also inflict heavy damage on the colony by chomping the solar panels that will stop you from recharging your alien frying laser and defensive shield.

Colony

As the game begins you must balance your strategy between sowing seeds and harvesting mushrooms to gain your revenue and building fences and solar panels to slow down the alien advance.

The colony isn't entirely abandoned to survive on its own and so you order supplies of seeds, fencing and panels that will be delivered on the next shipment. The ship also has the added bonus of destroying all the aliens that have infiltrated the camp but as soon as it goes they'll be back. By selling more and more mushrooms you'll be able to buy more fences and solar panels as well as some special equipment such as better lasers and shields and a second droid that automatically patrols the colony for aliens.

Unfortunately, you can only carry four things at once so sowing seeds and harvesting mushrooms rapidly becomes tedious. This game desperately needs more variety of aliens, a better storyline and more reward for surviving for over an hour than a pseudo Monty Python Ex-Droid speech. Surely there's more to planetary colonisation than galactic gardening!

Tony Hetherington

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