(CriticalIndieGamer) After a successful Kickstarter last year, Maia has released into the treacherous waters of the Steam early access. Currently, the game includes little more than basic base building, colonist AI, environmental effects and a beautiful lighting engine. Much like Dungeon Keeper 2 you do not control colonists directly, instead choosing what to build and where, and telling your robot where to dig. You may also notice subtle references, the model of robot that you use to dig is called I.M.P after the iconic imps from Dungeon Keeper and the main food source are hyper modified chickens. Much better than the boring old normal chickens of yore!
The Indie Game Website writes: "Maia is a passion project from one man, Simon Roth. For over six years, loving details have been injected into every barren crevice of his strange world. Countless light sources, thousands of lines of unique (and hilarious) text, and systems upon systems upon systems.
An unfortunate side effect of solo development, however, can be a narrowing of production vision. Details are all well and good, but if the foundations of a game result in an average experience there’s no amount of colonist slam poetry competitions that can save it."
Serena Nelson writes: "Weapons for colonists are finally in the game. The patch also includes behavior patterns for said colonists. Which apparently borked the build that needed some time to fix. But, after extensive testing and making sure the bugs have been squashed it looks pretty good."
Serena Nelson writes: "Why project creators decide to take months at a time off between updates is beyond me, but at least hearing from the development team from time to time helps to show that the game's not dead in the water. It's been six months since the god game Maia received an update, but it does look like a fair amount has been done during this period of dark silence. "
