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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