Surviving Mars

Great game. It took me a while to undertand the mechincs but now I am running Mars!

I should have known because paradox released it - initially the challenge is buidling a self-sufficient colony, once you do, what's the point of playing? I got so bored during my first playthrough that I haven't finished it (is there even a finish?) and I'm giving up on the game. Too bad, it had a lot of potential.

I enjoyed my first playthrough but there are some things the devs should address. After some time the birthrate in your colony will get out of control and there is no way to take action against it. You will hardly be able to build new domes in time. This could lead to big problems with resources like concrete water or even metals. And this is where the endgame really lacks. If all you can do is constantly build new domes just to keep up with the birthrate, the games starts to become tedious. I would say i had the most fun in the first 150 sols. After that it became mediocre.

The game is amazing, have been playing for quite a time now. But there is a big problem: The GOG version doesn't support mods. They don't tell this for you. I requested a refund, still no answer from GOG. To use mods you have to buy the Steam version.

This is a very enjoyable management sim with a lot of attention to detail. Not only are the resource management structures seemingly very well balanced and there are mysteries which are different each time you play which you need to solve as you grow your colonies. The attention to detail also extends to the graphics and honestly this part astounded me. To give you a couple of examples, when your rockets land or lift off, in the high level view (which you mainly go to in order to scan sectors or move quickly between different colonies) you can see the shadow of the rocket moving along, following the contours of the map. Another example is with the oxygen generation, you spend most of your time too high up to see detail but if you zoom in you can see a beautifully animated turbine inside a perspex dome. Its this kind of attention to detail you see throughout the game. For those who also use Linux as I do I can also confirm on my Debian OS this works great, I have a reasonable but not amazing gaming PC (750Ti, 4.93ghz 6 core AMD) and it has run very smoothly. So are there any negatives, some but I dont think they are generally major, You maybe dont get as much info as you may like on progress being made on some tasks but its hardly a major point against the game. It would be nice to be able to have colonists move domes a bit quicker, I am not sure why it takes five (in game) days. I am not sure yet if it will have quite as much replayability as something like Civilization but the mysteries do keep you coming back so I may be wrong on that count. If you are not a management fan of course you may not like it as much but thats hardly a fault with the game. Overall I think this is a very strong start for a game still being improved on at this time. I recommend giving it a try.