Per Aspera

Mine will be the third review for Per Aspera on the GoG storepage. The other two are negative and do a good job of pointing out flaws. Still, as a fellow management geek, I thought I'd write down where I think it succeeds. One of the best things about Per Aspera, is how satisfying progress can feel. You play as an AI, terraforming Mars through base-building. In one of the game's philosophical queries, you get to decide if you feel the base is part of you - functionally your own giant body. I'd say that Per Aspera succeeds at that impression. Plop down a building and the automated roads towards neighboring structures are spawned spontaneously, quickly forming tarmac arteries across Mars' malleable blood-red canvas. More than in other management games where you decide the fate of every tile, Per Aspera gives you the feeling of snappy power. Are there times you need to wait for resources, can the game's automation be daft, and have the devs made excruciating oversights within the game's finer details and its user-friendliness? Yes, and don't think Per Aspera can't get frustrating. However, the game does succeed at eliminating much of the micro-manage minutia of other titles this way, allowing you to focus on the big picture. And that big picture can be immensely gratifying. Even when waiting, seeing your resources zip about your ever expanding web across the planet, is a delight. In most management games, your sprawl is a succession of smaller steps within a limited playground. That sprawl can be beautiful, but your cleverness is at street level. Per Aspera inverses this dynamic by giving you an entire planet to play with and the challenge is how to design larger systems that make the detailed stuff work optimally. The fruits of your labor are suitably grand, turning Mars from a red desolace, into a nearly unrecognizable garden. At least, Per Aspera one-ups most other colony management titles in scope and size, even if that size doesn't always fit comfortably.

The tease of a narrative focus where you might get to guide the attitude of a planet spanning AI is interesting, but this game is let down by poor implementation of basically every mechanical decision. Resources are random, but the demand is skewed to need some far more than others. You can get a tiny trickle of new resource nodes by scanning, but not enough to keep your base going (and they're random). New resources can be spawned by producing another lander, but that requires a steady supply of relatively high level products to do. So you spend your time constantly on the threat of annihilation by starvation. And constantly waiting for resources to be produced to allow you a small measure of new raw materials. Until you progress in the campaign and discover a massive zone of high density resource deposits. Which is in a sea bed your own terraforming efforts will drown and make inaccessible 20 minutes later. And that's assuming your base isn't choking to death on its own traffic jams. So you have a choice between a story campaign that's crippled by the poor city builder, or a sandbox mode that's *just* the city builder. If you want to make Mars habitable, play Surviving Mars. If you want to be constantly worried about resource income, play Banished. If you just like a sci-fi city builder you have Planetbase or maybe Aven Colony. There's no reason to bother with thus until there are some massive overhauls of the core city building mechanics.

Unfortunately, I don't have words to describe worker order assignment and pathfinding in the current (patch2) version of Per Aspera other than "bad". You don't have to build a large base to run into these issues. Here are a couple I've run into almost immediately (hard difficulty). Early game base after the first colonists arrive, about 7 worker hubs. One of the workers keeps carrying steel back and forth between iron mine and steel factory right next to each other in an endless loop, not doing any useful work whatsoever. Fresh restart, building first mines and factories leading up to the drone factory. The only worker is carrying iron to the steel factory using a roudabout road that was historically built first (via a powerplant, another mine and the landing module) not via the much shorter road that was connected later. I enjoy the challenge of building efficient layouts just as much as I enjoy the premise and the plot of the game. When the game is challenging not due my choices, but due to programming, it quickly kills any motivation to proceeed. I hope pathfinding is improved in upcoming patches at least to the level where the issues are at least not base-breaking, and looking forward to give the game another go in a month or two.

I have to say, I keep being surprised by the negative reviews I see - this is one of the best games I've played in years. It's slow paced, thoughtful, and I found it an entirely enjoyable experience. I'm an absolute sucker for logistics / base management games, and while Per Aspera can feel a little clunky occasionally, each patch has delivered QOL improvements and addressed some of the clunkiness. Keep in mind that I'm reviewing this three years after most of the others. The game has had three years to shake off its growing pains. The best part of it, though, is the story. The voice acting is simply amazing; several points in the story almost brought tears to my eye, and another left me quite well spooked. AMI and the surrounding cast are wonderful to listen to, and I encourage anyone who buys the game to play it blind and without spoilers. If you like logistics