ExoColony: Planet Survival

Most colony sims that get written about have thousands of reviews behind them. ExoColony: Planet Survival has 28. That's worth saying plainly rather than hiding — this is a small, solo-developed release most readers won't have heard of, and this review reads its entire English corpus rather than a sample of it. What's there paints a specific, useful picture of a real game with real problems, not a placeholder score.

What it's actually doing

ExoColony puts you in charge of a colony across generations — your original settlers age, raise the next generation, and eventually hand the colony off, rather than the static population most survival-colony games run with. Around that structure sit the systems the genre lives or dies on: atmosphere and breathable-air management room by room, pollution control, resource refining, and eventually terraforming the wider planet into something closer to habitable. Reviewers who stuck with the game reach for exactly the comparisons you'd expect from that description — Oxygen Not Included for the systemic density, Surviving Mars and Banished for the colony-management backbone — and mean it as praise, not a knock on originality.

The rough edges, named specifically

The complaints in the sample are consistent rather than scattered, which makes them easy to trust. Performance is the sharpest one: one reviewer reports the game dropping to 2-10fps and calls it unplayable at that framerate, after only twenty minutes. Others describe the interface and pacing fighting them rather than helping — one reviewer with 71 hours logged says they still hadn't reached a 300-cycle milestone they expected to hit well before then, and directly blames a combination of interface friction and unclear systems rather than the game's difficulty itself. A third recurring note, from the 2024 Early Access window specifically, describes a bug that could relocate colonists into locations where they'd suffocate and die — reviewers at the time called the game unplayable because of it.

What changed by 1.0

This is where reading the full, small corpus pays off rather than just skimming the score. Two of the more detailed reviews were written after returning to the game following its June 2025 full release, and both describe real improvement: one says balancing and performance have come a long way since early access, and specifically credits the atmosphere mechanic as a highlight rather than a frustration by that point; the other, returning specifically to check on the 1.0 build, says the game is "definitely easier to keep... running" and that the suffocation risk from digging too aggressively — the exact complaint driving the 2024 bug reports — is no longer the problem it was. Steam's own patch history backs this up structurally: a steady cadence of updates through most of 2025 (v0.67 through v0.92, then 1.0 on 2 June, then a same-week 1.03 follow-up patch) shows a developer responding to exactly this kind of feedback rather than shipping and moving on.

That doesn't erase the performance and clarity complaints — they're recent enough, and specific enough, to take at face value rather than assume fixed — but it does mean the harshest reviews in the sample describe a build the developer has visibly kept working on since.

Reading the achievement curve

The completion data fits a genuinely deep, slow-burn colony sim. Early milestones — a first technological breakthrough, your first named colonist — sit at 62% and 52% of the player base. Deep-game achievements tied to sustained colony growth and multiple stages of terraforming fall to between 0.6% and 2%. That's a steep curve, but it lines up with what the reviews already describe: this is a long-horizon game whose systems keep compounding, and most players who pick it up don't push through to the far end of that curve — a shape that's common to the genre rather than unique to this game.

6.5 out of 10. ExoColony: Planet Survival is a small release with a genuinely interesting premise and real systemic depth, built and actively supported by one developer. The honest caveat is the review base: 28 total reviews is a first impression, not a verdict with much statistical weight behind it, and this score should be read that way. Within those limits, the signal is coherent — players who invest time describe a satisfying, comparison-worthy colony sim; the sharpest complaints are about performance and an unclear early on-ramp rather than the design underneath, and the developer's patch history suggests those are the parts most likely to keep improving.