In Mars Horizon, you take control of a major space agency, leading it from the dawn of the space age through to landing astronauts on Mars. Guide your agency through the space race and write your alternate history of space travel - any of the agencies can be the first to land on The Moon if you make...
In Mars Horizon, you take control of a major space agency, leading it from the dawn of the space age through to landing astronauts on Mars. Guide your agency through the space race and write your alternate history of space travel - any of the agencies can be the first to land on The Moon if you make the right choices. Manage the numerous challenges faced then and now:
Create your base with launch pads, research labs, astronaut training facilities, and much more
Construct your own custom vehicles from hundreds of combinations
Launch satellites and crewed spacecraft to explore the Solar System
Run mission control as you solve the various challenges of turn-based missions to earn scientific advancement and public support
Explore an extensive tech tree and compete or collaborate with other agencies to plot your roadmap to Mars
Choose from five unique space agencies, each with their own traits, base, vehicles, and spacecraft
Create your own custom space agency
You’re in charge of every element of the journey into space: success rides on your decisions.
Will you push to stay ahead of the other agencies, or focus on testing and research? There are multiple ways to ensure the first person on Mars is under your command. Every choice matters: will you invest in the most advanced technology or take risks in the rush to the red planet?
Using actual events and missions as inspiration, can you handle the challenges faced by real space agencies?
Management is a vital aspect of Mars Horizon. You'll need to design and build the right spacecraft, hire and train the crew, and make strategic decisions as mission control to survive the journey to Mars.
Enter into diplomatic partnerships with other agencies to share the rewards of space exploration, or risk going it alone to gain greater prestige. Construct the ideal rocket from historically-inspired vehicle parts. Hire contractors to construct vehicles and use their unique benefits to gain a key edge over your competitors.
Launching a payload into space is only the first step. In assuming the role of Flight Director of mission control, you'll need to manage your spacecraft's resources and solve strategic challenges in turn-based missions in order to succeed. But beware: space is a very unforgiving environment.
These are the critical moment-to-moment decisions of mission control; do you spend power to fix a malfunctioning antenna or save it in case of an oxygen leak? Perhaps risking that extra three months of mission planning could have avoided this issue?
Mars Horizon has been made with the input and support of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the UK Space Agency.
We’ve collaborated with numerous experts in space exploration from the ESA in creating Mars Horizon. From engineers developing the technology used in Mars programmes, to those designing the next generation of missions, bringing an unprecedented level of authenticity, realism and legitimacy to the gameplay and its scenarios.
From the screenshots, it looked like a deep strategy.
Rocket construction and research are too simplified, the research tree offers minimum freedom. Real space flying problems were reduced to the mission puzzle-minigame. Everyone will have all technologies in the tree researched. The game is extremely repetitive, only the puzzle minigame becomes harder in late missions adding more randomness and unreliability to your modern ships than first rockets.
No crew training, no personal management, no real science actions, just grinding missions to get "science XP" and "gold" to buy the progress in the tree.
Everyone shall follow the single defined path to Mars.
After finishing the crewed moon landing mission (cca 30% of the game i was keep playing just to finish the game).
Animations and poor. Original art also poor.
Get involved in the space race! You are a space agency and in the beginning of the space race, competing against other countries to be the first in space, on the moon, and finally on mars.
Be aware, this is not KSP! It is a simpeler version of "Buzz Aldrin Space Program Manager".
The UI is clean and simple, and there is a cartoony-ish look in it.
You can enable a tutorial to guide you with the fist mission, but I didn't find any need for it as the game is fairly easy to understand.
In a nut shell;
You research a mission objective, this will unlock the mission and let you research the required components in the techtree. You build your rocket and plan the mission. On success you get research points, on failure, you lost your money and reputation.
If you have launched some form of payload you will enter a sort of mini-game, where you have a few turns to collect the requested resources. If succeded the launch is a success on failure, again you lost money and fame.
You do this with the competition, so you have a sort of pressure to be the first and score the highest points.
And this is the whole game.
I personally find the game fun but very repetitive, and after a few hours the fun wears off. If this was a boardgame I think it worked much beter, compeeting with some friends, bragging with your victories, making fun of their failure.
If you like a simple game and don't mind the repetitive factor, give this a try.
Click to +1, click to +1, click to +1, repeat a few thousand times, then you have completed the game! It's so boring, you will not know when you have landed on the moon, you will not know when you have completed the game, it's just clicking from one screen to the next over and over again. There is no way to fail, there is no meaningful decisions to make, and there is no story of any kind.
The game design is basically every mobile phone cash grab ever made with a different theme and a different skin, release a game every 3 months, rinse and repeat. If you've played one you've played them all.
TLDR: your 8th grade history report on NASA, but as a videogame.
Pros: The game runs, I didn't notice any bugs, and it was engaging enough that I finished the NASA campaign.
Cons: Gameplay is simplistic to a fault, excessively repetitive, and you won't learn anything. The "historical context" notes are a whitewash that leave out anything possibly unsuitable for an 8yr old. Which is a lot.
The rocket building mechanic is too simple, rockets have only 3 parts and basically the only thing you do is make sure the weight capacity of a part is higher than the weight of the parts stacked above it. The base management is totally ignorable, which is good because it's not interesting. Launches are mostly random, you get a 1-99 "reliability score" and a dice roll. Mission gameplay is a point and click matching exercise between color coded resources, labeled with space word salad. I autoresolved wherever possible and resented the fact that I couldn't autoresolve milestone missions.
The campaign is at once meandering and constrained. You can only win by going to mars, and you can only get there by doing the missions the game gives you, but many of the historical milestones they give you have nothing to do with mars at all.
If the game is about landing people on mars, why do I have to start in nineteen-fifty-bupkis and spend the mid game throwing robots at gas giants?
If the game is a generic space program simulator, why are the milestones all historical missions in historical order? Why only one win condition?
Much like post 1972 NASA, the game doesn't seem to know what it wants to be and probably doesn't have the resources to get there anyway. Go play KSP.
Mars Horizon tells the story of your space agency from the very beginnings until man first lands a crewed mission on mars.
It's a mixture of Space Agency management simulation and puzzle game.
In the management part you have to chose what rocket parts, buildings or missions to research, what buildings to add to your space center and what missions to plan (by deciding on the composition of your rocket and payload, the contractor who may support building it and additional parts for your rocket - that have impact on the various stage of it's flight). You're always competing against the other space agencies that long to reach certain milestones (e.g. first animal in space, moon landing, deep space probes ...) as the first one. Being fast gives you more support and therefore more funding but also raises the risks of critical failures.
In the puzzle part (during the missions) you have to create specific amounts of science and navigation points by chosing what operations to perform in a limited amount of turns, always keeping your payloads energy levels (and later in the game drift, radiation and heat) in mind.
Unfortunately both of the games parts get repetitive very fast and therefore the game changes from an interesting race to mars to a tedious clicking through the same screens over and over.
A big plus is the in game wiki that tells you the real life story behind the stages you're currently playing in game often with well presented pictures and sometimes other media (e.g. first signals of sputnik as audio).
The missions are presented with short 3D sequences showing the current stage of your mission (in the milestone missions there are even some more sequences showing you the progress of your current mission).
All in all it's a nice but flawed space game depicting a good amount of space flight history.
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