Building watch towers near enemy borders forces your land to expand and vice versa, and there’s some genuine excitement to be had from trying to beat your opponent to fully gaining control.įor the first few hours of my time with The Colonists, I indulged myself in the campaign, which is a surprisingly full-bodied experience, each level taking on average an hour or so to complete. If you want a purely chill experience, you can completely omit combat missions, but personally, I really enjoyed the tug-of-war type battles caused by rival robots trying to take your land. That being said, the advisor tool is useful, especially if you’re struggling to work out your aim, offering plenty of tips and advice to push your colony forward. The same went for trying to work out the stats pages there’s ample information available, but I couldn’t really establish what any of it really meant.
I’m certain it was me doing something wrong, rather than a bug or another, pesky issue, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what I should do differently. In the end, I deleted the ships and started again, miraculously forcing them to get the goods to my village and stop their trade embargo on my robot settlers.
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At one point, I had three ships sitting idle, full of much needed stone for my second township, but couldn’t get my boats to make the trip across the pixel seas.
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You can send ships out for expeditions to find new land, but, once I’d established a harbour on a far off shore, I couldn’t work out how to carry on ferrying resources between my two territories. Notably, for example, I struggled with properly managing my harbour. It’s a small niggle, but it stems from uneven tutorials, where some systems are well taught, but others, aren’t explained at all. You can build storage yards to store any spare goods, but resources don’t automatically assign, and it’s a little frustrating to try to effectively manage multiple yards, ensuring you aren’t creating a holdup in your pipeline. The key to success is to not bottleneck resources produce too much, and your robots will stop working until space frees up for more stuff. Whilst the basics are simple stuff (placing buildings and upgrading tech are all easily managed via idiotproof radial menus), there’s an art to mastering The Colonists that’s not initially obviously. It’s like watching an army of ants mill about their day, and it’s as charming to watch as it is to manage. At each interval, a node is placed and a robot is stationed, allowing your workers to relay resources between points to speed up building. Generally, robots can only move across paths and roads, the latter needing to be placed four spaces apart. A timber yard, a mine and residences are always your starting point, as well as somewhere to produce food and water. Once your robots have unpacked resources from their ship, you quickly establish the necessary buildings to start your colony. There’s a handful of different modes, but they all encompass a similar objective land your shuttle, harvest resources and form a colony. It feels like a mini, modern Anno, or the Settlers there’s even a sprinkling of Age of Empires DNA in the mix. There’s a warmth about The Colonists, nostalgia inducing gameplay that harks back to the golden age of management sims. It’s as relaxed a journey as you’d like it to be, and rarely does it get stressful enough to pull you from your happy place, despite a few confusing systems along the way.
Perhaps, that’s why the Colonists works so well on Nintendo’s stalwart. It’s the kind of comfy gaming that feels great sandwiched between day to day life and that serious, AAA blockbuster you’re devoting the bulk of your spare time to. The Switch really is the perfect console for management sims, isn’t it? There’s just something really satisfying about getting into bed, pulling up the duvet, lights off, Switch in hand, playing late into the night on a non-taxing resource manager.
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