Surviving Mars review

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Here your goal is to colonize Mars, with all the cutting-edge technology at your disposal.

Surviving Mars gives you the right to be the colonizer of Mars, an extraordinary mission, but a somewhat complicated and slow one.
The campaign mode of this game gives you a series of objectives, from easy to very hard, with many references to great science fiction. As in every city management game, you must choose which structures to build, maintain them and seek resources to keep building, growing and, of course, surviving on this red planet. One of the most complete games, with hundreds of buildable items, it is worth taking on this out-of-this-world experience.

Gameplay

Like any good city-simulator RTS, it has many resources, but these are more complex and challenging than some common ones like SimCity and City Skylines. The first big challenge of the game is knowing how it works; in this part I personally, despite playing several RTS and some city simulators, had some difficulties and had to restart the game a few times, simply because the game has no proper tutorial, only tip balloons, which don’t always help, and you end up lost, bankrupting your colony. After going through that and learning more about the game, you start to flow better with your new “Martian” colony.

After that, you have some essential resources for your colony, initially made up only of drones that need power to work. Solar power, of course. With that you will also start gathering concrete, oxygen, water, shelter and food, which are the first priorities. Water is kept underground, in rare pockets of ice. To extract it, you need to use one of the many machines, which are made of metal and concrete. These devices are supported by networks of power plants, cables, piping and air filters, which work as the infrastructure for everything.

After all this, it is time to invite humans to live on our new planet; you need to enter a submenu and make the request, which costs some amount of money. But before they arrive you need to build some “domes” in which the cities and shelters sit. These house our humans, who are ready to work, mining more things, which they need to build houses, farms, schools, hospitals, snack bars and bars. The factories take the raw materials and turn them into new resources, which are used to build ever more useful structures.

While all this is happening, we search the planet for its secrets, including scientific discoveries that fill a vast tech tree. And, like every good game of the genre, survive major natural threats, such as lightning storms or meteors.

The resources acquired can be sold to planet Earth, and with that money we can invest in researching new items and machinery. Like any construction, all the buildings, factories, robots and piping need repairs, which is also always good to keep an eye on, otherwise it’s game over.

Not everything is rosy; besides the lack of a basic tutorial in the game, its progression is very slow. I personally took about 2 hours to manage to attract humans to live in my colony. The game has a real-time accelerator, but nothing that makes it much faster.

Unlike City Skylines and Halo Wars, I felt a slight discomfort with the adaptation of the game to the console controls, even though it has many more commands than both of those, but nothing that will get in the way, and with a bit of practice you get the hang of it.

Over time the game gets more and more complex as your colony grows; besides maintaining everything, you have to solve every citizen’s problems, from jobs to happiness.
Procreation is hard, requiring massive investment in hospitals, schools and universities. So colonists who become old and frail, or who die, must be replaced by new humans. But all of this results in a vast burden of construction and administration that feels less like a game and more like a city master plan.

Audio and graphics

In this part Surviving stands out; the graphics look good, but it is the small details that catch the eye, from the red dust on the drones and machines to the trails left by them. Natural events and lighting are very well done and realistic for a game of this style.

The soundtrack is quite simple but pleasant, it doesn’t get tiresome, and the sound effects are also quite acceptable.

Conclusion

Surviving Mars is a complete and quite complex city management game; for lovers of the genre, there will be no shortage of options to have fun, and even with its slow start it is possible to lose hours in its very complete evolution of cities and people. With great graphical details, Surviving Mars aims to be a reference for its genre.

Fun: 6
Audio and visuals: 7
Gameplay: 6

The review copy was the Xbox One version.