Per Aspera

I had a good time with Per Aspera, but I can definitely see where the criticism comes from. The conveyor belts and resource management might conjure up comparisons with Factorio or Surviving Mars or a Sim City type game. It really isn't like any of them. The 'threats' and challenges in Per Aspera barely gave me pause at any stage of the game. Meanwhile, the construction and terraforming goals were such that even at 16x multiplied speed, much of my time was spent waiting for the next progress meter to fill, almost giving it the feel of a walking simulator. That sounds like a bad thing, maybe? But I'm dualboxing and I rather enjoyed that I could do other stuff in between. It fits with the titanic task of rendering Mars habitable. The lack of complexity does kind of grate, however. Resource production only has two tiers. Colonists require only two resources. Trees, lichen and cyanobacteria look pretty as they spread across Mars, but there's very little practical management required, nor possible. The rising water levels and oxygen levels pose either a small or huge obstacle. But either way, they won't affect your game after you solve the immediate issue. All in all, at any given point in the game, most of your problems can be solved just by waiting. The narrative parts of Per Aspera stuck with me after playing. The narrative is quite engaging, not to mention pertinent to the future of the human race. We have to consider these matters that the game raises, if we're ever going to consider colonizing the red planet. Billionaires and governments going into space is a horrible, neverending curse that will destroy us. We have to build ethical space programs, with sustainable environmental and psychological oversight, while any AI guidance at that time must be carefully cultivated.

I generally don't leave reviews but this game i found it compelling to state some facts regarding imbalance of things. I completed campaign and sandbox play through and that means that I tasted both aspects of the game. Story was interesting and it kept me engaged at time as it makes you rethink your strategy and how to deal with certain situation while keeping your primary TASK of transforming mars at hand, now there are some other fun stuff that can happen and I wont spoil for people but lets say that was really good experience over there. Enemy AI is trash, by that I mean its so dumb its going from point A to point B and all u have to do is intercept it and kill it, the only tedious task over there is depending how far are you with your units from where he is gonna attack and how spread you are on the planet... It only got to me at the end of my sandbox playthrough to find out how badly FOOD and WATER imbalance is for colonies, its totally unrealistic and needs heavy revamp. I know realism shouldn't be mandatory for alot of games but the way colonies work is very poor. I was trying to balance so many things with food and water and no matter what I did i couldn't go over 6000 colonists on the planet and that was with over 1k buildings built around. ASTEROIDS, I hate them so much, they make me go around and fix things, there is no quality of life there its just pure annoyance, and the worst part is you don't get notification where you got hit and you have to scroll the map and find "holes" in your network to look and fix stuff, now don't get me wrong that's part of gameplay but still quality of life notification would have been nice so you don't need to spend so much time clicking rebuild manually and also adding rebuild ALL button would have been even better so you can focus more on transforming Mars. Overall the idea was great I found it most engaging to terraform and find stuff its just that when you are at the end It starting to take a toll on you...

1) The game does a very poor job explaining how to actually play it. This leads to wasting a ton of time making mistakes that could have been easily avoided had the game either emphasized their importance (build tons of worker drones in a very specific pattern) or explained what you were supposed to do (keep an eye on O2, and don't let it get over 30% or things start catching fire and it's EXTREMELY difficult to get the O2 levels to go back down again). 2) The entire point of the game is to terraform Mars. Upon completing said objective I get a few lines of dialog from a character boiling down to 'good job, but this is just the beginning' (spoiler alert, it's not, that's the end of the game), and a dramatic pan around Mars showing that it is still red without any shred of green on it at all. 3) Most of the game feels like busy work. After a point I set the game to 16x speed, only slowing down for extremely tedious 'combat' segments where you can very easily get completely wrecked if you aren't paying attention because it takes forever for the combat drones to move around, so if you miss something say goodbye to several hours worth of gameplay repairing everything. This also led to the hilarious situation where the characters I'm interacting with should long since be dead due to old age. The most tedious part of the game is managing the food and water supply for the colonist, since the drones take their sweet time getting them food and water. I had thought when liquid water started appearing it would ease the burden a bit, but as many other reviewers point out, NOPE. They can't use the water or grow any food themselves. Overall, I honestly regret ever having played this game. The only positive thing I can say is that it is so mindless to play that it was nice to be able to just set it to 16x speed and watch my little drones go zooming all over the place while I kind of zone out.

Per Aspera shows a clear need to receive continued work by the developers. In its current state, while still promising, many features feel inconclusive and premature. Time will tell if there will be additional and beneficial work applied. On my end, the developing team seems quite unresponsive. They barely reply on the steam forums, and until now never showed up here on the gog.com forums. This adds to my doubts. Therefore i applied for a refund. Not ruling out to get it again at a later date, but only if the devs eventually show up and transparently take on the current issues with the game.

The game has a somewhat thought provoking and suprisingly enjoyable story. The process of terraforming mars feels alot more fun too than for example in the game by that name =) Just gotta realise that mostly you want to play on higher speed and possibly drop the speed a bit for ocassional bouts of combat or for getting a better handle on how your logistics are doing and what transport lines / production lines you should improve to get a better overall efficiency.