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When gamers think of City building simulators, the games which comes across the mind is SimCity. But the genre didn’t get a huge recognition as expected and many major developers started avoiding this genre. Many indie developers and publishers have released few city building sims like Tropica 5 but nothing too memorable. But it looks like city building genre is finally getting some attention from developers with games like Cities Skylines and Cities XXL. And Project Aura (from indie developers Pixel quality Games) seems to be the most promising title of the lot.
Project Aura is a city-building sim with a twist. In the game, you will have to take charge of a colony of survivors, floating in the oceans. The story is set sometime in the 21st century after climatic change has reached a critical point and humanity’s only hope for survival is to create colonies of hibernating humans to wait out the storms. So players have now been tasked with awakening the hibernating humans, building up a colony and restarting human civilization.
Colonies start out with limited resources and no development. Players will need to balance their resources, like currency and food while developing their colonies. After a while, players will be able to build more structures and platforms, thereby expanding their colonies. Players will have the choice to choose either the colonies are self-sufficient or can be traded with others.
The game includes expeditions and taking care of citizen specializations
The game also includes some unique features. For example, unlike in other city-building simulators, Project Aura lets players control their colonies through the manipulation of organization charts where your citizens specialization will matter greatly. Players will also have to take care of the needs of their citizens like placing them in roles that fit their specialization, if not, they will lose morale.
Another unique feature is the ability to make expeditions into the climate devastated planet. This way, players can retrieve artifacts which will help them find out what event has occurred. It’s more like Noah’s Ark with a twist.
Project Aura has some great visuals and not so demanding requirements. So this means it can run decently well on older computers. The minimum system requirements are below:
- CPU: 2 GHz
- Memory: 1 Gb
- NVIDIA GeForce 8600
- ATI Radeon HD2600
- Video memory: 512 Mb
- Sound card: any OpenAL compatible
- Disk space: 1 Gb
- Windows XP, Vista, 7
Project Aura will be entering early access on Steam on January 5th, 2015. Check out the game trailer below:
