Surviving Mars

Colonist: "I'm angry! We don't have enough food!" You: "We have enough food for like the next 3 weeks, what are you talking about? You're literally eating a sandwich right now." Colonist: "I won't be happy unless we have enough extra food for 3 months! I refuse to work!" You: "You're a farmer. If you were doing your job instead of walking around being angry, we'd have plenty of food and then you wouldn't be angry anymore." Colonist: "I don't want to do my job, I want to be angry!" You: "OK, go back to Earth and be angry there, moron." Colonist: "No! I want to be mad HERE! I'll just hang out using up your resources. By the way, we don't have enough food!" That pretty well summarizes Surviving Mars once you have an established colony. It's very fun to set up your base initially and get it going. But by the mid to late game, most of your time is spent trying to keep the whole thing from unraveling because the colonists are too stupid. You'll have a whole colony with plenty of resources, plenty of living space and entertainment, and a well-designed transportation network - and then one day you're in a prolonged crisis because of people just walking off the job like idiots and making all your buildings operate at one-third of capacity. The worst part is that you can't just send them back to Earth or shove them out an airlock; you have to keep supporting these morons while they loaf around, until they either die or leave on their own. I found the most effective way of dealing with them was to make them live in their own separate dome well away from the rest of the colony, and give them no food or resources. A literal Angry Dome. Eventually some of them get so mad they go back to Earth, but about half are so stupid they stick it out all the way until the bitter end and starve to death. Well, of course your Mars colony is going to fail if people who are all supposedly engineers and scientists with PhD's go around acting as stupid as apes.

I played this game on Steam when it was available to try for free. There are basic issues in it's mechanics. The pipes and wires you need to connect to stuff don't always connect where they should. Dome connection tunnels and pips and wires block each other. One needs to play a bit, then restart after learning the games pesky idiosyncrasies about where to place things, and even then you might need to trash stuff occasionally because a placement was bad for what the game wants for its pipes, wires, and tunnels. The game requires preplanning for placing everything and offers you no aid in doing so. Plus you got to even research the tech to actually clear a wrongly placed structure. You can trash something for some of your resource back, but its husk still blocks construction, both inside and outside the domes. So you need to thoroughly plan your city before you put anything down which requires knowledge you only get from playing. Sorting and selecting mechanisms for choosing colonists and such sucks, making it much more of a chore than it should be. Tracking down colonists you need is similarly a pain. Finally once you get past the first part of the game and you don't screw yourself with placement the game doesn't like or accidentally use resources you need for getting other resources. Like oops you sold the rare metal you needed to make the plastic factor for some basic construction. Time to restart. Once you get production of everything you need going, there is normally no risk or challenge afterwards. There is some semi-interesting events that appear randomly, maybe requires expansion, but the games lack of proper explanation strikes here too. Like It gave me 3 options with pros and cons but one of those options was grayed out saying I need a mayor to use it. Another event had a option grayed out saying I needed a politician or was it governor, to use it. But neither of those are citizen specialties! How do you get them?!?

Normally don't post reviews, but decided to this time because a previous review was entirely inaccurate, claiming that this game on GOG does not support mods. I own this game on GOG and play it regularly, and currently have 50+ mods installed for it that are all working fine. Some are cosmetic, some are quality of life tweaks, and some are even minor bug fixes. I find this game very relaxing and quite enjoy building and terraforming, and mods are definitely supported regardless of the platform it's purchased on.

There seems to be some confusion about this, but this game IS fully working on GOG *with* mod support, and there is nothing missing/unavailable compared to the Steam/Epic versions. While the core gameplay loop is above-average for this genre—and it's certainly a relaxing builder (think along the lines of Life is Feudal: Forest Village, but in space) whenever you just want to build a big, sprawling civilization and micromanage it—it doesn't really do anything that hasn't been done before, so I wouldn't consider it a "must play." That said, even though I own MANY games similar to this, I don't regret buying it nor sinking several hundred hours into it since its release. This game's real strengths lie in Achievement-hunting; some of those weird niche-scenarios often require a lot of creative problem-solving to survive (without exploits), and usually end up being a lot of fun. The only real downside is Paradox's now-typical DLC money grubbing. Most of the important qualify of life changes, new/revised gameplay mechanics and interesting core features are paywalled behind pricey, greedy DLC - so you really need them to play the "actual" game. Buying all of the DLC would be absolutely absurd, though... so don't do it. Instead, I'd recommend buying JUST the base game when it's on a decent sale here on GOG, then downloading the DLC installers from a "trusted source" for free so you aren't missing 70% of the content. Don't pay Paradox to be greedy. One of the critically important functions fulfilled by DRM-free games is that of putting SOME power back in the hands of BUYERS - so be sure to exercise yours by circumventing Paradox's unethical business model where and whenever you can.

game starts out promising but you soon discover the AI is as dumb as rocks and micro management begins increasingly annoying later on. 1st the ai is dumb the drones are too stupid to figure out how to use tunnels to get resources from other parts of the map the shuttles don't help either so you have to end up micro managing rovers to ferry resources back and forth through tunnels on a regular basis. you can set up trade routes but as soon as the resources run it it cancels and you have to set it up again and again! the drones are stupid too they don't do maintenance often they just sit there and do nothing and your buildings, pipes etc end up malfunctioning! you have to tell them to do maintenance most of the time! it's not just the drones that are dumb the colonists are brain dead too you even have to MM them tell them to stay in a jobs and houses otherwise they will wander all over the place changing domes and jobs even if you lock the domes to their profession! they are too stupid to pick the closest house to their jobs than complain about not working in their home dome... game has so many problems like the concrete extractor always running out of resourcees even though it still says there is 300 left to harvest you have to keep destroying and building them in different spots... shuttles don't work well either they just sit in their hangers and won't collect resources it will practically say there is no shuttles for colonists even though the hanger is full! game needs A LOT of updates and changes before it will be fun.