“Will this new game run on my Mac using Parallels Desktop?”

The answer is “Probably not…”, but sometimes the answer is “Yes!”

I am frequently asked “will this new game that was released last week run on my Mac using Parallels Desktop?” My standard answer is “Probably not.” Then I go on to explain that games usually stress the hardware of your computer. This new game likely won’t run on a Windows PC purchased last year. While I would be thrilled to say that Parallels® Desktop can magically transform a four-year-old MacBook Air into a high-end PC gaming rig with a $3,000 liquid-cooled graphics card, that is never going to happen.

But sometimes I am wrong.

Sometimes a new game runs well on the Mac in Parallels Desktop. Overwatch runs well, and so does Age of Empires II Definitive Edition and Age of Empires III Definitive Edition. A newly free game that was placed on the Epic Game Store in November 2021, Aven Colony, also runs great. So, I will show you Aven Colony in this blog post.

Aven Colony is a city-building game like the famous SimCity, but instead of being on Earth, Aven Colony is based on an alien planet light-years away from Earth (Figure 1).

*Figure 1_Aven Colony running on a iMac using Parallels Desktop*

There is an excellent tutorial that teaches the game’s controls, and there are both scenarios and freestyle experiences in the game. Video 1 shows parts of this tutorial and some game play, running in Windows 11 with Parallels Desktop 17 on my home iMac. (While this video has been edited for length, I have deliberately not sped the video up. You are seeing the actual game speed and animations in the video.)

As you can see in the video, the graphics are gorgeous, and the animations are buttery-smooth (artwork in the video title screen credit: Pooterman and used with permission of the artist).

I am looking forward to lots of fun game play in Aven Colony on my iMac in the coming months. In the Parallels Forums, please tell us about the games you play in Parallels Desktop, and also the ones you want to play in future releases of Parallels Desktop.