Game review: Artist Colony

Since we were snowed in all weekend, I decided to waste some time playing Artist Colony. It looked a lot like Virtual Villagers. Since I really enjoyed that series, this should be fun too, right? Well, it's mostly fun. As with most simulation games, there is a set of goals that the characters need to finish. The story is about a group of artists coming together to rebuild an old artists' colony. (There's a backstory about friendship and love, but it's not really all that necessary to the game play.) You get money to complete tasks by selling the artists' works. Since you begin with only two artists, it's a little difficult to raise money. However, once you start attracting new artists to the colony, things can really get moving. Then it ends up being a little difficult to keep track of everyone. On top of that, I found myself getting bored with the tedious task of training the artist and having them create masterpieces to sell. Perhaps if the selling part went a little faster, the creating part wouldn't be so dull. As it was, I ended up with artists that couldn't create anything because I filled up my gallery yet no one was coming to buy anything.

Overall, it was a decent game. There were little annoyances, but I could easily overlook them. If nothing else, I wanted to see what the end result was.