Astro Colony is great and it has the potential to be one of my favourite games.

It feels like a cross between a couple of famous mods: Space Exploration from Factorio and Skyblock from Minecraft, and at its core Astro Colony is mostly an automation game. You start with a small platform in space and have to manually mine asteroids to get your initial resources. You use those resources to build asteroid catchers, power plants and smelters, and eventually unlock the technology to make your platform move around.

This is where the game gets good. The void is not as empty as you think, you're surrounded by small planetoids and larger planets. You can dock to these celestial bodies and drag them about with you through space, or build on them, or retrofit them into your own moving spaceships. You can even dock them onto each other and make your own smooshed-together world cobbled together from the cosmos. At this point the game opens up and the possibilities for being creative start to skyrocket.

If you're starting to feel lonely, you can invite NPC astronauts to your colony. At the moment they're fairly rudimentary, but having them in the game makes it feel like you're building your space station FOR A PURPOSE. You're not just building machines to build machines, you're trying to make a place that people can call "home."

On the technical side, I'm very impressed with the performance of the game and how well all these systems work together. There are games that really start to suffer after you make a sizeable world, but AC runs smoothly at scale. Even the multiplayer mode runs without any noticeable performance problems, it's an impressive technical feat.

Should you buy it? If you like automation games and are looking for something noticeably different then Astro Colony is well worth the price of admission. If you aren't familiar with this type of game you might want to try a free/cheap automation game to see if you like this kind of thing, as it's a very particular sort of experience. If you see AC on sale, I'd say it's worth snapping up. The dev is still working on the game as of this review, so it'll only get better, and it's already pretty damned good.

BTW, I know the dev will read this, because they've said they read every review. So if you do Terad, just know that as a fellow game-maker I have a huge amount of respect for what you've made here. Thank you for your game.

IF you like Space Engineers and / or factorio. You will fall for this game and it's not even done with development yet.

The bugs are minor and easily ignored in most cases, the devs fix the bugs relatively quickly and efficiently.
There are ongoing changes to key components but the overall theme and direction the game seems to be going is enough to say, that if you like these types of games you will love this and regret not getting it if you pass it up.

Positive is the freedom and constructing is easy