![]() Often it feels like the difficulty is artificial, like you failed not because something was hard but because the game didn’t tell you how not to fail in the first place. It’s just bizarre, or even outright frustrating, and combined with the threadbare tutorial the difficulty curve in this case is more of a difficulty wall. They’ll choose jobs they’re entirely unqualified for, then get sad they’re not qualified for the jobs they’re working at, and yet still refuse to move to a new gig even if there are slots open. You’ll hear something like “Food Shortage,” check your overall levels and see 3,000 food in storage, and have utterly no idea why Drone A can’t cooperate with Drone B to get food to Dome C. Worse, there’s very little indication of what’s actually going wrong. Getting the drones to work the way you want can be utterly aggravating, and I’ve often found myself seething when a dome is rapidly falling apart and the reason is that none of my drones thought to move any metal or concrete into the area so repairs could be done. Thus to get supplies from one end of your base to the other often means building storage areas wherever hubs overlap and then hoping the drones are smart enough to move the necessary items back and forth. Drones are assigned to a certain drone hub though, and these hubs only cover a small radius. At the heart of this are your drones, autonomous robots that carry supplies around your base. Like the Anno games, Surviving Mars is more about constructing logistics than ordering individuals around. You’ll find out when you go to place your first mine and can’t.Īnd the drone system is a massive pain. The catch: The mine has to be within a certain radius of the habitation dome-and the game doesn’t tell you that until it’s too late. For instance, in order to extract metals you need to construct a mine for your colonists to work in. Important information is also hidden two or three levels deep, and some elements aren’t revealed until after you’ve already messed them up once. Also, it doesn’t highlight whatever research you last finished, so I hope you remember. WASD won’t work to pan it over, nor will the scroll wheel. Control issues are the most minor, but I find myself stuck on them-for instance, the research screen doesn’t scroll unless you move the mouse to the right side of the screen, but if you’re playing in borderless windowed mode your mouse will just…keep on going to your secondary monitor. The interface in particular could use another pass or two. That feeling of accomplishment is what draws me back to Surviving Mars, even though the game desperately needs polishing. And it’s a kind of optimism that seems resurgent in recent years, at least as it pertains to spaceflight. It’s the kind of optimism humanity had about space travel in the 1960s and ‘70s, before NASA’s funding was strip-mined, before we stopped looking past low-Earth orbit. And after a decade of dismal apocalypses and post-apocalypses, I get the feeling Haemimont wants you to come away feeling good about our chances. That sort of retro-futurism seems almost anachronistic in the context of this serious survival game.įutures are imagined though. It’s all soft curves, lush grass-filled habitation domes, mid-century modern apartment buildings and condos. The visual style seems to imply exactly the opposite, however. It pays to go slowly, to build water tanks and batteries and oxygen tanks as stockpiles, to get some research under your belt. One miscalculation in your oxygen supply, or the amount of food you have on hand, and the whole colony could be wiped out. Chances are you’ll work for at least an hour or two before humans ever step one single foot on Mars, and for good reason-once they’re there, they can die. You’ll start hunting for underground water sources to exploit, or if you’re unlucky you’ll be forced to rely on condensing scant amounts of moisture from the air. You’ll build a solar panel, some cables, maybe a concrete extractor. You’ll land your first rocket, packed with drones and whatever supplies you could carry-a bit of concrete, a bit of metal. Thus it falls to you to oversee the construction of humanity’s first planetary colony from scratch. Turns out Mars doesn’t really want us there, either-or at least is indifferent to whether these fleshy pink creatures on its surface live or die. It’s more of a colony builder than a city builder though, and as you’ve no doubt inferred, Surviving Mars trades the blue waters of the Caribbean for the red soils of our nearest planetary neighbor. Surviving Mars is the latest city builder-type game from Haemimont, the developer behind the last few Tropicos.
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