Colony Survival

Nine years is a long time for any Early Access game to stay in Early Access, and Colony Survival has now spent nearly that long proving it can be both genuinely loved and genuinely unfinished at the same time. Pipliz, a two-person studio, launched the voxel colony-strategy game on 16 June 2017 with a pitch distinctive enough that it's kept a substantial, devoted audience engaged ever since: build a Minecraft-style block world, recruit colonists into specialised jobs, and defend what you've built against zombies that attack every single night. More than 8,000 Steam reviews later, sitting at a Very Positive 92%, the game is still labelled Early Access — version 0.17, "Quests & Counters," landed in early August 2026 — and understanding why that's true, and whether it should change a buyer's decision, is most of what this review is about.

A genre mashup that earns its comparisons

Reviewers describing Colony Survival reach for genre blends more often than straightforward comparisons, and the range of comparisons tells its own story. "Colony Survival is something like Minecraft with a tower defense mode," one straightforward review puts it. Another, more memorably: "It's like if minecraft had sex with age of empires, but the parents CRISPR'd in some tower defense." A third strips it down to its most quotable form: "Minecraft but with a science tree, better graphics and, most importantly, slaves" — a joking but structurally accurate description of the colonist-labour system at the game's core. The tech tree genuinely does span from a Stone Age starting point through to gunpowder weapons, gliders, printing presses and rail transport, giving the mid-game a real sense of technological progression on paper, layered on top of a day-night cycle where daytime production feeds directly into nighttime defensive stakes.

Co-op multiplayer draws some of the most consistently specific praise in the review sample. Full cross-platform support, dedicated server tooling, and the option to either share ownership of a single colony or build separate colonies that trade resources and science with each other give the game real flexibility for how groups of friends want to play together — "I have owned this game for many years... I was amazed at the difference" one long-time player writes about a major version-9.0 rework, a sentiment echoed by others who've stuck with the game across multiple major updates rather than bouncing off it once.

The complaint that's followed the game for years

What keeps this review from being a simple recommendation is a criticism that shows up consistently across the review sample's timeline, including recent entries rather than only its rockier early years. "The zombies aren't actually difficult because of the way they scale and the gameplay never evolves," one review from February 2026 states, describing the overall experience as "a chill, base-building game disguised as a zombie survival game" — an accurate label for a game whose marketing leans on nightly siege tension that a meaningful slice of its own players don't feel it actually delivers past the opening hours. A similarly recent review, from January 2025, makes the related point about job variety: "there's no real threat in this game. the progression is entirely in the science tree, once you unlock everything there isn't much incentive," describing colonist jobs as feeling largely interchangeable once established rather than meaningfully diversifying as a colony grows.

Development pace draws its own pointed criticism, made sharper by the studio's own communication style. Pipliz publishes a weekly "Friday Blog" — the entry current at the time of writing is numbered past 269, an extraordinary cadence of sustained public communication for a two-person team. That transparency cuts both ways in the review sample: "They talk about developing the game infinitely more than they actually spend developing it," one detailed, highly-upvoted review states bluntly. "If they applied as much effort to the game itself as they did in their blogs (over 250 at this point) then the game would already be done." It's a fair tension to name honestly — the blog cadence is genuinely admirable as a transparency practice, and it's also become, for some long-time players, a visible symbol of how slowly the underlying game has actually moved relative to how much has been written about it.

Evidence the loop still works for a lot of people

None of that should overshadow how much of the review sample remains genuinely enthusiastic, including from players with enormous playtime investments — reviews in the sample cite playtimes well over 10,000 hours, a scale of engagement that speaks for itself regardless of any specific mid-game criticism. "This game is amazing, the Devs are dedicated and on point to things their community wants. That's already more than most companies these days," one long-time player writes. Recent version updates suggest the studio has kept listening to specific, actionable feedback rather than standing still: 0.15 added a top-down view and blueprint system directly addressing base-planning complaints, 0.15.1 focused on "culling" performance work, and 0.17 adds a quest and counter system aimed at giving players clearer mid-game goals — arguably a direct, if incremental, response to exactly the plateau complaint raised above.

Where this leaves a buyer

At NZ$35.99 for a still-Early-Access game with no clearly communicated 1.0 timeline after more than nine years of development, Colony Survival asks for a specific kind of buy-in: trust that a small, genuinely communicative studio will keep iterating, weighed against a real, currently valid criticism that the experience plateaus once its initial hours of colony-building novelty wear off. For players specifically drawn to genuine co-op colony building with real nightly stakes, and willing to treat ongoing development as part of the appeal rather than a drawback, the loop that's kept thousands of reviewers engaged — some for thousands of hours — is still very much intact. Buyers hoping for a fully realised, content-complete late game should treat that expectation with real caution, and weigh the studio's remarkable communication transparency against its equally well-documented pace.