Surviving Mars (2018)

I really wanted to love this game, but gave up in the end. The premise is really interesting, graphics are nice and whole gameplay had so much potential, but multiple disadvantages ruined this game for me:

• No possibility to win a run
• Dumb AI (people don't move normally between the domes, drones do not prioritize fixing the leaks or delivering most needed resources
• Random events, which intentionally complicate your run
• Some things are made to be overcomplicated (like if you want to mind asteroids, prepare to build 20 sun modules and etc.)
• Main events are quite boring and end quickly

Surviving Mars es ante todo un juego entretenido que premia la toma de decisiones correctas y la capacidad de resolver los problemas emergentes. No solo eso, el juego tiene una estética grandiosa y la administración de recursos requiere un delicado balance a medida que aumenta la dificultad del juego.

La estética del juego es fantástica, los domos y demás estructuras son en extremo convincentes y las colonias tienen cierta belleza que retrata muy bien lo que puedan esperar los verdaderos colonos de marte algún día.

El juego se beneficiario mucho de mejores herramientas para el aprendizaje y el control de las colonias ya que la mayoría de veces la única forma de aprender es cometiendo errores graves que en muchos de los casos se hacen imperdonables y llevan al fracaso de la partida.

Introduction

Surviving Mars is a city-building game. You pick from a wide variety of starting options, fill a rocket with resources & buildings and use those to start a small colony only inhabited by robot workers. Once you've set up the required infrastructure for humans to survive (water/oxygen) you can recruit colonists.

Building a colony

You absolutely need concrete, so your starting base needs to be near a deposit. After that your priority is rare metals. Exporting rare metals is how you (usually) make money, concrete is needed to build pretty much everything. Water deposits just mean you need fewer moisture farms, metal deposits seem to be a waste of manpower. It's all rather simplistic most starting factions follow this same pattern (some can make money with tourism).

Recruiting colonists

Colonists all have different specialties and traits. You have to find the right specialties to staff your buildings and try to minimise the amount of negative traits (e.g. alcholic, lazy). This is a fairly core system of the game but unfortunately the filter system is terrible. Instead of having every option shown and filtering on-the-fly, you enable some filters and apply them to filter out jobs/traits you don't want. So, if you just want to list all medics you need to disable all other specialties and hope enough get past your trait filters. Every time you want to change them you have to go through two screens, it's so clumsy. It feels like a placeholder system they forgot to properly implement.

The rest of the game

You explore the planet sector by sector, which is quite slow. You find resources, anomalies or nothing. Anomalies either unlock techs or offer you different options (pick from two resource deposits, resolve a conflict). Research unlocks buildings, improves buildings/colonists/robots, gives money, et cetera. You can pick a storyline at when you set up your game, the one i played involved scanning/research but i didn't progress through it. Your starting faction also sets up a number of goals (x of this, y of that, do z), i think you just get rewards for that like with in-game milestones.

Problems & conclusion

Surviving Mars is slow. I played for 7 hours and feel like i just got started. The core gameplay is a bit too simplistic because you basically have to follow a certain path or fail. Selecting colonists is a chore. Research starts taking too long. Colonists can only travel a tiny distance from their dome by themselves - i shot myself in the foot with the placement of my first dome. There are no messages/auto-pause for rocket travel (e.g. no "your rocket has arrived" message). There's a bunch of other, smaller flaws too.

But it's not a bad game. Once you've learnt about some of the weirder design flaws (seriously, colonists can't walk 100 meters to their work?!) it's kinda entertaining. I'm definitely going back and try another game to see what those main quest are about, but i'm definitely going to cheat because IMO it takes too much time to play by the rules. You really have to be a fan of the genre to get more than mild entertainment from this.

Played a couple of days during Steam free trial. I like the game and it feels like a spiritual successor to Outpost. I played on Easy (the international sponsor) as a mayor and used the rule option for +500 applicants. I modified the initial rocket load to remove some of the prefab buildings and add some rare resources and extra probes. I landed on Elysium and used the extra probes to find a better landing site next to the default tile. I had already played the tutorial so I knew how to play.

I built all the required infrastructure and built the first dome. I found selecting people to be more more tedious than needed. The filter option auto fills the rocket for you rather than sorting the applicants, which makes it harder to find the type of people you want. I was also annoyed that there is no way to filter by nationality and that race is not shown until the colonists land. I had one incident where the water chip failed and I decided to do nothing about it because I figured my one water extractor would be good enough. It was not. I had to scramble to fix the water shortage and put 3 plans in motion. First I learned how to do remote construction using the RC commander and RC transport by building another water extractor some distance from the base while also ordering some prefab evaporators from Earth and trying to unlock the tech to build evaporators. Luckily no one died.

I then built a triangle dome a bit to the north to exploit a rare metal deposit, and then a triangle dome attached to the main dome. I did not like how attaching domes uses up buildable space. I eventually got a shuttle hub and was disappointed that the people in the distant dome could not partake of entertainment in the main domes. I also built 2 sets of tunnels to get past the massive trench taking up the middle of the map; this was annoying because I kept having to order machine parts from Earth to build it. I later tried out the ramp option to get access to a plateau west of my base and I think that would have worked better than tunnels. After I got shuttles I wanted to see how well they would work for remote construction, so I built a brand new base from scratch in the far north of the map. With the RC commander and a universal depot the shuttles flew needed materials for construction. That base was built next to another rare metal deposit. My other domes were exclusively American and European, so I made this one exclusively Chinese and Indian. I had prefab factories brought in and later built another polymer one. Despite that, I was constantly short on polymers.

Fun game though it does get tedious at times. It would be interesting to play harder scenarios such as the option where Earth is destroyed and you only get what the initial rockets can carry.

I came in to this partly expecting something like Cities, but this reminded me of something quite different. In a way it plays and feels a bit like Offworld Trading Company in the way you have to juggle about your resource based balances (and there are many materials that dictate the ebb and flow of balance) It's far less chaotic and much more 'crawley' it in it's pacing. The game itself is nothing at all like cities really.

It's not hard and its not unbalacned its not bad at all, its just not all that fun for me personally. It doesnt have the novelty or lore rich type stuff that Alpha Centauri does to really reel you in and make you feel like you are really pushing ahead on something important, and the second phase of the game with the colonist/villager management (stonehearth) isn't what brought me to play the game. The game probably blossoms up and gets more interesting but without the backstory or really engaging gameplay (i dont much like stuff in the sim genre anyway) I won't ever get there.