Surviving Mars Review – Overview, Storyline, Pros, Cons, And More

They always tell you to “get to Mars,” but they never tell you what to do once you get there. City building games have been around for as long as gaming itself. Considered one of the original genres in home gaming, city-building and survival simulations have taken us to every type of world there is. There are fantasy simulations, medieval castle-builders, modern cityscape constructors, and even the occasional off-world exploration sim.

There are as many types of city-builders as there are cities, even some that have taken us to Mars, but none of them compare to what we played for this Surviving Mars review.

COMPARISON TABLE

What Is Surviving Mars?

It could be easy to mistake this simulation for all others as the aesthetic and basic mechanics are not necessarily innovative. Most survival and city building sims have the same basic premise: you are the all-powerful builder, the architect of this new civilization, and the people of this world are relying on you to design and implement a place they can live in peace and harmony. While that remains true throughout this Surviving Mars review, we quickly learned that, unlike most passive environments in other games, Mars is not keen on keeping us around for the long haul.

The basic start to the game does not differ from other survival sims, so it will feel familiar. As the head of a chosen agency, be it a private corporation or space-age nation, you must take the initial steps to colonize the red planet. The eventual goal will be a sustained and thriving population on Mars, but before you can colonize with living, breathing folks, you must wrangle up the necessary resources and get the base camp up and running. With the help of some friendly robots and automated rovers, you can brave the harsh environment and begin collecting the needed elements for survival.

At this point, most survival games become more of the same. Your job becomes more stockbroker and less environmental planner, with all of your attention turning to the continued growth against the rates of demand and population. While most simulation builders are content with letting you grow out that urban sprawl, Surviving Mars will not let you forget that things break, deteriorate, and eventually self-destruct.

The constant maintenance and attention needed for the colony to continue thriving is often maddening. The dust of Mars does not care that your colonists need oxygen to survive, and it will beat down on your respirator extractors until they are no more. There is a consistent need to maintain your machines while at the same time expanding and growing the population of colonists you are fighting to support.

Most city-building simulation games allow you to coast along once you’ve got that flow of taxes and commuter goods flowing in and out. A good strategist and patient player will have no problem expanding their empire and giving the citizenry everything they need once the town coffers are filled in abundance. Over the course of playing for this Surviving Mars review, we were consistently reminded that the old coast-on-the-coffers strategy was not going to work on the closest neighbor to Earth. Mars doesn’t want us there and works hard to show it with every turn of the day-night cycle.

Resource Management

As with almost every game in this genre, your ability to expand and thrive is based on the flow of resources in and out of your civilization. Your game begins with the selection of a parent organization that will give you certain advantages and resource buffs at the start of your colony. For example, if you choose to use a private corporation with the ultimate goal of harnessing the mineral resources of Mars, you will get a boost in that arm of production. In contrast to that, you can choose a space-forward country that will boost your initial money pool and make it easier to populate your empty glass domes.

The initial choice of skills and buffs is not a new mechanic for a survival building game, but it can have far-reaching implications as you move further into your colonial development. This becomes especially important when the end-game starts to kick in, and you are faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge. The early game builds, and planning will all come to bear fruit once the end-game mystery closes in.

That brings us to our favorite part about this game, a feature unique to all the games in this Surviving Mars review: There is a mystery to solve.

What’s The Mystery?

One of the most common complaints about this type of simulation game is a lack of replay value. The goal of these games is fairly consistent, and it’s the same here, as you’re tasked with getting as many people there as possible. Though that mechanic is still the central theme of Surviving Mars, it’s not the end-game. The most amazing part of this game is the eventual and inevitable introduction of a narrative goal.

The inevitability of the collapse of your colony might just seem like a ticking clock mechanic, but from day one of your simulation the mystery has been selected, and fate has set it in motion. The clever addition to this mechanic is the random mystery event you will have to face. It might be a natural disaster in the form of unforgiving dust storms. It could be the total collapse of your oxygen production system. Sometimes, you might get some self-aware artificial intelligence that decides they no longer want to work for you. Because the regular resupply ships from Earth are crucial, something terrible back home could set the scene for your eventual demise.

Oh, and yes, to answer your first question, it could also be an alien invasion. The classic sci-fi tropes are on full display here and used in brilliant if not subtle ways. This design gives the player an ultimate end game goal with the mystery, something that not only makes it more exciting but gives it replay value often missing in these types of games.

How Does It Compare?

We’ve selected a few other games for this Surviving Mars review to see how they stack up against it.

Surviving Mars Review - In Conclusion (5/5 Stars)

We really enjoyed our time with Surviving Mars and would highly recommend it to any fan of this genre of games. The replay value is amazing and offers exciting mysteries each time through.

Because of this and so much more, we give Surviving Mars five out of five stars.