Surviving Mars Review — IGN
Surviving Mars
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By Leana Hafer
Updated: Feb 8, 2022 6:09 am
Posted: Mar 15, 2018 1:00 pm
I stopped asking the question, “How can you make a survival city builder?” when my metal mine ran dry. That left me without materials to repair malfunctioning power cables, which caused my oxygen generators to go offline, resulting in the suffocation deaths of dozens of people in my previously thriving and wondrous Martian colony. Life on the Red Planet is always perched on the razor’s edge, which gives an engrossing and only sometimes frustrating sense of danger and urgency to a genre that’s usually laid-back and relaxing.
Your mission in Surviving Mars is to establish a permanent population of living, breathing, potentially insane humans on a sprawling, pleasingly rendered map based on real terrain data from our planetary neighbor. Everything from windmills to the little automated drones that run most of your infrastructure are done up in a Roddenberrian, clean, almost cute aesthetic that evokes a sense of optimism and comfort that’s almost comically dissonant with some of the disaster situations I found myself in. Over time, they will gradually accumulate a thin layer of red dust that helps things feel more lived-in, and serves as a nice visual reminder of which structures haven’t had a maintenance check-up in a while.
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Getting all of these pieces to work together is no simple task, and you’re given relatively incomplete, almost bare-minimum advice on how to do so. To be fair, Surviving Mars is mostly a sandbox game in which you’re free to run your colony as you see fit, but there are certain benchmarks you’re encouraged to hit, like maintaining a colony of at least 100 people. As I was learning the ropes I spent a lot of time sitting around confused about what to do next while I waited for a crucial advancement to become available in the semi-randomized tech tree or for my pool of prospective colonists back on Earth to refill.
How was I supposed to know that I needed a machine parts factory quickly?It became a lot more fun once I’d failed my way into a better grasp of its systems, but that initial learning period was more frustrating than anything else.
How was I supposed to know that if I didn’t get a machine parts factory running quickly, I’d lose my ability to generate electricity and have to watch helplessly as everything falls apart? It’s the kind of game where I’d recommend you watch someone else who knows what they’re doing play it and take in the basics of keeping a colony’s lights on before diving in yourself.
Just about everything comes down to having enough of the proper resources and the ability to get them where they need to be, creating a complex supply chain puzzle. According to Surviving Mars, people need food, water, and oxygen to live. Since resources are constantly consumed to maintain every structure and power cable, rather than just when they’re first built, production needs to be kept up at a minimum baseline at all times. A break anywhere in the chain can lead to cascading, catastrophic failure. At the best of times, I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie where I had to figure out how to get life support back online before everyone died.
At the worst of times, I was frustrated that I had nothing to do but wait for a new round of funding so I could order a rocket from Earth to provide a much-needed injection of crucial resources and get the production loop working again.
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Luckily for those who would rather simply build an interesting Martian ant farm than constantly fight off a colony-wide cataclysm, there are lots of ways to tweak the difficulty to make Mars more survivable. Selecting from a nearly endless number of available colony sites allows you to decide how abundant certain resources are, as well as how often you’ll have to deal with natural disasters like meteor strikes. There are also several mission sponsors that have different advantages and drawbacks, some of which entirely change how you play.
The International Mars Mission is essentially “Easy Mode,” with nearly unlimited funding that makes it very difficult to fail – people can’t breathe money, but with sufficient wealth you can constantly import everything you need from Earth on a precise schedule and never have to become self-sufficient.
At the other end of the spectrum, selecting Paradox Interactive goes… about as well as you’d expect having a major interplanetary colonization effort funded by a mid-sized Swedish video game publisher would go. Cash is so scarce that there is no margin for error at all, and you have to execute every phase perfectly while budgeting down to the last scrap of metal to end up with a livable environment.
You can certainly make your life harder on purpose by inviting alcoholics and antisocial creeps.But no matter which setting I played on, I didn’t find that the individual personality quirks and flaws of my colonists that’re displayed when you’re sorting through prospective recruits created much in the way of interesting scenarios. It could be partly due to the fact that I took full advantage of the ability to weed out some of the less stable applicants, but everyone more or less behaved like good little worker bees. You can certainly make your life harder on purpose by inviting alcoholics and antisocial creeps you just know are going to stir the pot, but as there’s no real incentive for doing so beyond the inner demon that causes you to summon tornadoes upon your SimCity.
There are always plenty of healthy, hardworking applicants to choose from, so this it feels more like an optional novelty than a core game mechanic.
I was more impressed by the mysteries — a set of semi-linear, choice-based tales that unfold over the lifetime of your colony. They deal with anything from the discovery of microbial life to battling a greedy corporation that wants to claim Mars’ resources for themselves, which involves some light combat in the form of a turret defense subsystem. A new mystery is randomly chosen from a pool of about a dozen at the start of each game, adding a lot of potential replayability.
If you can stick it out through an unforgiving and poorly explained learning phase, there’s a lot of excitement, challenge, and customization to enjoy beneath and beyond the grand, glass habitation domes of Surviving Mars. I wish I’d had more reasons to care about the people in my colony than just the balance sheets for synthetic polymers and microchips, but at the end of the Martian day, it’s like a SimCity sandbox where everyone can die at any time because you made a minor miscalculation in your electrical grid.
And that’s actually pretty exciting.
In This Article
Surviving Mars
Haemimont Games AD
Rating
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Platforms
PCXbox OnePlayStation 4Macintosh
Surviving Mars Review
good
Surviving Mars isn’t easy to dive into, but once you do it’s a satisfying struggle to balance your supply chain as though your citizens’ lives depend on it.
Leana Hafer
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Our Verdict
Surviving Mars is a lot of hard work, but managing a burgeoning colony never stops being compelling.
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NEED TO KNOW
What is it? A deadly survival city builder set on Mars.
Expect to pay £35/$40
Developer Haemimont Games
Publisher Paradox Interactive
Reviewed on Intel i5-3570K @ 3.40 GHz, 16GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 970, Windows 10
Multiplayer? No
Link Official site
£2.79
View at CDKeys
View at Fanatical
View at Amazon
380 Amazon customer reviews
☆☆☆☆☆
«A colonist has died,» Surviving Mars’ AI assistant warns me in its detached, robotic voice. By the time I’m looking at the dome where she’s kicked the bucket, four more colonists have joined her. It quickly becomes a cascade, with people collapsing and gasping for air in every dome. In an alarmingly short space of time, my sprawling colony of hundreds is decimated.
Surviving on this inhospitable world is no mean feat, but it’s worth the effort.
Famine, dehydration, domes cracking and exposing their denizens to the deadly world outside—my first colony ended up being a lesson in the folly of setting up shop on Mars. Over 300 colonists perished. It started comparatively peacefully, however, with cute drones and pressure-free building projects.
Humans don’t start coming to Mars until they can survive there, so all the infrastructure needs to be established first. By the time the first human set foot on the planet, I had an elaborate life support network pumping oxygen and electricity to everything from domes to drones, as well as lots of ideas about what to tackle next. The list of potential objectives is daunting, but by not forcing you to worry about the needs of the colonists first, Surviving Mars has a forgiving early game.
Depending on the bonuses that you get from your chosen mission sponsor, you’ll also get some extra help.
The easiest sponsor to pick for your first game is the International Mars Mission, netting you a substantial budget. Money doesn’t mean anything on Mars, but it’s used to buy cargo that can be sent over from Earth, helping out until you become self-sufficient.
Nothing else marries survival and city-building so deftly
Ultimately you’re setting up the foundation of your production chain. Despite its survival bent, Surviving Mars still follows the same pattern as Haemimont’s Tropico, turning resources into finished products and building whole industries out of them, all while trying to keep everyone happy, or at least placated. It’s something familiar to hold onto when the curve balls start flying.
Even dust can be dangerous, and Mars is exceedingly dusty. All that dirt loves getting stuck on solar panels, causing power issues and mechanical problems. It’s a low-key but persistent threat that becomes a micromanagement nightmare as you try to make sure that every panel is looked after by drones and every building gets serviced before it inevitably breaks down.
Between the dust, meteors and tornados, carving out a life on Mars is a lot of work. Overcoming these disasters and watching as an army of drones fix everything is an incredibly satisfying experience. If you’ve planned for the worst, kept your stockpiles topped up and put your drones in the right place, you’ll be treated to a mechanical ballet as diligent gatherers scoop up resources and then, in seconds, have everything under control, fixing up machines and repairing drones all over the colony.
Even once you’ve got some automation set up, however, it still feels like disaster is nipping at your heels. It’s a battle between humans and nature, and for all the fancy tech, it’s dogged perseverance that builds successful colonies. It’s thrilling rather than exhausting, though. Something is always going on, making sure there’s no time for ruts, and most of the the crises feel surmountable with a bit of creative tinkering.
If only humans were as great workers as drones.
It’s not their fault. Mars is an awful place and living there takes its toll, so colonists need their mental well-being looked after. Working during the dark hours, getting sick, seeing someone die—there are so many invisible threats to colonists’ mental state, and they can eventually culminate in depression or even suicide.
That’s why domes need to be filled with infirmaries and social spaces. These places give colonists somewhere to blow off steam and get help, but they also need to be staffed and maintained, necessitating more resources and colonists. That’s the tension at the heart of Surviving Mars: it constantly drives you to expand, whether through resources running out or colonists needing more services, but expansion puts even more demands on your colony.
Since these complex colonies can grow to a gargantuan size, Surviving Mars needs a solid UI to make sense of it. Unfortunately, the one it has isn’t up to the task. There are quality of life features, like the ability to pin things to a taskbar for quick access, but the menus are messy and there’s a lot missing.
It provides a broad overview of the colony, but there need to be more ways to dig into the details.
The result is a lot of extra micromanagement, which seems out of place in a game where you command armies of automated helpers and hoard state of the art technology. I actually like that even once you get a pretty advanced colony going you still need to be hands on, but there’s often just too much to juggle at once.
As fiddly and stressful as Surviving Mars can be, nothing else marries survival and city building so deftly. It’s a tricky but satisfying space disaster, but I do wish I’d managed to save those 300 colonists.
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Surviving Mars
Surviving Mars is a lot of hard work, but managing a burgeoning colony never stops being compelling.
Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he’s been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer.
Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He’s also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he’s not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog.
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Surviving Mars Game
03/18/2018
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Comment
On March 15, a very wonderful and interesting game Surviving Mars by the team Haemimont Games was released, and several streamers and let-players, including RIMPAC, Antik, Slavik Odessit and many others, took up its review.
More precisely, they took up the reviews even before the official release, some on March 7th, some on March 10th, and thanks to this, the toy is quickly gaining popularity and receiving positive feedback from users.
Surviving Mars is a real-time economic survival strategy game about setting up a colony and surviving in the harsh conditions of the red planet. Surviving Mars is somewhat similar to Planetbase, but at the same time it has a number of qualitative differences.
The game begins with the choice of the organizer of the mission. The choice is given: International Mars Exploration Program, USA, India, China, Europe, Russia, as well as several commercial companies. All missions of course differ in complexity. And is it worth saying that the most difficult mission is when passing through Russia? At the start, there is the least money, fewer ships to organize flights and deliver goods from Earth, fewer volunteers, and of course the biggest bonus for complexity. By the way, the fact that SpaceY is present is interesting, a kind of reference to SpaceX
After you select the country or company for which you will play, or rather the difficulty, you will be asked to choose a commander who gives the settlement certain bonuses.
The commander is not a specific person, but rather a set of perks that affects the amount of money, the speed of ships and drones, the set of technologies at the start or the speed of their study, and much, much more. At this point, everyone determines the strategy for the development of his colony.
Then you will be asked to adjust the cargo set on the first ship, if it makes sense, but all streamers agree that the set is just what is needed.
And so, upon landing, you will be asked to choose one of the landing areas, which also differ in complexity, the number of natural disasters, resources, and terrain complexity.
After landing, you find yourself on Mars and you need to lay the foundation of the first settlement. At the beginning, you have no colonists, just a set of cargo and drones. And you need to explore and extract minerals, build the necessary set of production enterprises, organize the necessary infrastructure for the arrival of these same colonists.
You can earn money by sending precious metals for sale to Earth, but before that you still need to find and extract them, and before that, you need to do a lot. Moreover, you will not be sent a ship with provisions just like that, only for the money you have earned.
Letsplay
RIMPAC started the game as Russia, chose Futurist as the commander, with a perk of +30% to the speed of researching breakthrough technologies, and landed a missile in a location with an increased probability of a meteor shower — Pearl Earth, near the equator. The total difficulty at the start was 235%. It is also worth noting that RIMPAC spent a very long time exploring the surface of Mars looking for deposits of precious metals, which did not allow us to finally determine the location of all buildings for their optimal use.
Watch Surviving Mars by RIMPAC
Antik started playing Paradox Interactive, which is 20% more difficult than Russia and caught up with the overall difficulty up to 505% by choosing the most difficult factors that affect the game.
He also took Futurist as commander, saying that he had the most useless bonuses and chose Mount Elysium as a landing site with natural disasters, such as abnormal cold and dust storms, at the maximum. It is also worth noting that Paradox Interactive provides only one rocket, which, until the fuel plant is built, you will not send back to Earth for help.
Watch Antik’s letsplay at maximum difficulty:
Slavik Odessit started the passage at the lowest difficulty of 0% by choosing the International Mars Exploration Program, but he was thrown into the very corner of the location with a huge crater in the center. Those. until he can build tunnels, he will have to bypass this same crater both when conducting research and when extracting resources, which means that the infrastructure will turn out to be very stretched and inconvenient.
Watch Surviving Mars let’s play by Slavik Odessit
The game can be purchased on Steam, there is Russian localization
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TagsAntik RIMPAC youtube let’s play about games about colonization about Mars about reviews about strategies Slavik Odessit
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Overview of Surviving Mars DLC Green Planet: a breath of fresh air
Surviving Mars is an excellent sci-fi strategy game in which you are tasked with the colonization of Mars.
In Survival on Mars, you have to manage hunger, oxygen consumption, and even their mental health while colonizing a dead red planet. Or maybe he’s not so dead after all.
With the latest DLC from Haemimont Games, you can start terraforming Mars, improving soil quality, setting up magnetic field generators, and creating breathable air. The Green Planet expansion adds an extra layer of complexity to the addictive management sim, offering an optimistic look at what humanity can expect in the future if we don’t destroy ourselves beforehand, that is.
It’s worth the $20 price tag though? Let’s take a look.
Terraform up to
Mars Survivor: Planet Green
$20
Bottom Line: Planet Green is a great addition to Mars Survivor, but it highlights some vanilla features that love can use.
Pros:
- Well designed with dynamic strategic capabilities
- Attractive visuals with updated cosmetic features
- New hazards increase difficulty for enthusiasts
Cons:
- Animal farms split into separate $4.
99 DLC feel a bit cheap - Weak base edition features may still use some love
- See Microsoft
What You’ll Love About Surviving Mars: Green Planet
Surviving Mars: Green Planet is a pervasive expansion that adds an extra metagame on top of the existing formula. Now when you play Surviving Mars with Green Planet installed, under the resource panel you will see an additional user interface that determines your progress in improving the atmosphere of Mars, temperature, atmospheric water supply and vegetation quality. To improve on each of these stats, as you make Mars truly habitable without domes, you’ll be provided with a number of new buildings and structures that come with additional management challenges.
To increase the vegetation on Mars, you need to start using seed dispersal agents that spread lichen spores to the planet. You can also start pouring water onto the surface of Mars in the form of lakes that come in all shapes and sizes.
Naturally, you’ll need to balance your colonist’s own water needs rather than just dumping them in the mud, and cold waves, if you’re playing over the equator, can add extra complexity to this process.
As you gradually start seeding Mars with water and spores, you can start pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so the water doesn’t just evaporate into space. Mars does not have a strong enough magnetosphere to shield itself from the Sun’s harmful radiation, but you will also be provided with buildings and satellite facilities to create an artificial magnetic field to help in the process.
New landscaping tools allow you to clear uneven ground for planting outdoor trusses, as well as create ramps between different elevation levels for access without building expensive tunnels. Waste rock is also becoming much more useful as a resource that can be recycled in greenhouse gas plants to help release beneficial atmospheric compounds into the air.
As your colony grows and terraforming progresses, you will gradually begin to see how the barren red planet fills with water, greenery and becomes warmer.
Some hazards, such as cold waves, will subside and be easier to manage as Mars gets warmer, but new hazards, such as toxic rain and Mars, will be more common.
Additional levels of strategic complexity, combined with the creative possibilities offered by Green Planet, make a $20 purchase a solid one. Some of the shortcomings of Surviving Mars: Green Planet may have more to do with Surviving Mars itself than with the DLC.
What you won’t like about Surviving Mars: Green Planet
Surviving Mars: Green Planet is a great piece of DLC and the problems mostly come down to problems with the base game, not the expansion.
Planet Species gives you access to other AI colonies trying to survive on the red planet. Many of the interactions with these other colonies are largely useless, and don’t really save on the occasional offloading of excess resources through trade. They are not connected to the expansion of the Green Planet at all, which makes them feel a bit chained.
Many of the full missions of gathering resources or launching satellites aren’t very interesting either, and the menus that guide their choices are very sluggish, especially on Xbox One.
There are a few minor annoyances that Haemimont can easily fix with a patch in the future. Lush vegetation such as trees, etc. can make it difficult to see where you are running cables, etc. as it is all obscured by trees.
I think Haemimont could do a little more with some of the opportunities that a green planet provides. Are mutants of underweight alien wolves roaming the Martian forests? Sleeping creatures awakened by pervasive environmental shocks? Of course, there’s plenty of room for future content, but the lack of integration between Green Planet and other features like the Space Race DLC could have been done much better.
Finally, it’s a little annoying that the Animal Farms come as a standalone $5 DLC in addition to the $20 Green Planet add-on, or can be bought together for $23.
It just feels like overkill and tarnish, especially when they run together.
Should I buy Surviving Mars: The Green Planet?
Green Planet is a great DLC overall that adds optimism to the colonial-style gritty sci-fi game. The idea of being able to colonize planets beyond our own is a tantalizing reality that may never come to fruition, but at least we can experience it here in what is by far the best space colonization simulation game available on Xbox One to date. day.
4 of 5
It’s a little annoying that Project Laika’s livestock DLC is separate from the main pack, but that doesn’t stop Green Planet itself from being a great addition to the base game. If you consider yourself a Martian gardener, definitely pick one up.
Eat your greens
Survivor Mars: The Green Planet
From red to green.
Mars Survival: The Green Planet adds extra creativity and challenge to the infectious sci-fi strategy sim, and it costs $20.
