Star Colony Review

Star Colony is a strategy MMO developed and published by Elyland LLC. It was released in April 2016 as a browser-based game made in Flash.

Gameplay

At its core, Star Colony is a base building game. Buildings cost a certain amount resources, which you can get by building harvesters to gather resources and building silos to increase your resource cap. There are many different types of structures you can build, each with different effects. For example, recruitment centers allow you to recruit troops while the various types of labs allow you to level up your units. Every building starts at level 1, which you can upgrade to improve their effectiveness. Constructing a building requires a free worker, and you start with two workers. You can get more workers by buying them using diamonds, the game’s premium currency.

Attacking another player’s base will allow you to plunder their resources. Oddly, the player you attack is completely random, but you can scout them first which allows you to abort your attack, or attack another random player instead. Attacking requires troops, which you can train from the recruitment center. Once you’ve sent the troops to attack an enemy base, win or lose they will be gone. Even survivors of the battle will be gone. You also cannot control them. They have their own preset AI that automatically chooses its target. As a result, learning how to send only the bare minimum troops necessary to win is an essential part of playing this game.

Just as you can raid other players, so too can they. From time to time, other players will attack your base. If your harvesters or silos are destroyed, the enemy can steal a portion of your resources. Successfully defending against them requires good strategic positioning of your base defenses. Thankfully, you can move your structures anywhere in the map for free. You can also buy shields, which prevents other players from attacking you, but it also prevents you from attacking other players.

But what makes Star Colony stand out is the art style. You see, the game’s art style is pretty much a Starcraft ripoff. There are three races in the game, the human, the swarm, and the ancient. And all three are a dead ringer for the Terran, the Zerg, and the Protoss. The buildings, the units, nearly everything, was taken from Starcraft. Why they did that, I do not know. It doesn’t even make sense story wise as you can build all three factions’ units for no reason. Even more baffling is that they didn’t steal Starcraft’s art outright, nope. They redrew everything. So they have an art team, and this team chose to copy Starcraft outright for some reason.

The Good

If you like Clash of Clans and their ilk, you will like this game. The game mechanics is pretty much taken from those and Star Colony doesn’t do anything new with them. Frankly I consider this a plus since there’s nothing wrong with keeping a winning formula.

There’s a lot of variety between the units you can use. You can train swarm/ancients units, or you can stick with the humans troops, or maybe you could mix and match. It’s all up to you. And since units don’t return from battle, you have to think about your troop compositions. Sure, you could probably destroy a base using brute force by sending 100 troops of the same type, but even if you win, you won’t be able to break even from the costs incurred training those forces.

Same thing with base defenses, you can’t just mass one type base defense and call it a day. Only build plasma cannons, and other players will just send air units to wreck your base. Only make air defense and the reverse will happen. You can’t rely on brute force. You have to plan and design your base.

As a result of all of these, the gameplay ends up being fun. You can test which units works well together, which base defenses works well, safe in the fact that what you are doing will matter in the game.

The Bad

For one, the story doesn’t make sense. You can build swarm and ancient units/structures for no reason. They even give you quests. Now I am not expecting RPG tier story, but at the very least they should at least give an explanation why you can build other faction’s units/structures.

A lot of the time the randomly selected player that you can attack has already been attacked by another player and their resources are already gone. Since win or lose your troops don’t come back, attacking other players isn’t economical. You’re better off building your base defenses instead.

Star Colony is also P2W. There are items in the game, like nukes, that allows you to destroy enemy bases quickly. You can only get them as prizes from the dice mini-game which requires money for each roll. Premium users also get more troop XP among other bonuses.

Closing Thoughts

There’s nothing unique about this game, in fact, you can say that this game is a combined ripoff of Clash of Clans and Starcraft. But the result is fun to play and has enough depth to require you to strategize. And that’s all that matters really. So in the end, I recommend it to anyone that’s bored or wanted a Clash of Clans for the PC.