Surviving Mars

This is a game that takes many hours to play. For the second time, after more than 20 hours invested, I got a game breaking bug. First time, no more cargo screen for the elevator and asteroid landers, breaking that part of the game. Second time, texture bugs (spinning and flipping items, textures missing) followed by the game crashing. High end hardware, low end laptop, Windows 10 or LInux, AMD or Nvidia made no difference, the game remained broken. This is a shame, as Surving Mars was a great game before the fatal "upgrade". Stay away, save your time, money and all the frustration.

Yesterday a friend of mine invited me to play Surviving Mars on his Laptop and well, first it was a really great experience and it was fun to build a first foothold of mankind on Mars until.. until we built our second dome for the colonists. There is no (!) way to connect domes and build special units for different purposes in that way (e.g. an entertainment district, a farming dome, a living dome) - instead you have to place the same basic buildings all over again in every dome with just slight differences. That felt so wrong, it completly ruins the game. E.g. colonists can starve in one dome but with another dome entrance just some meter away, they wont get there, even not using the spacesuits they came in. And there here are no tubes to connect the living spaces of the colonists. We couldnt believe it. It is such an obvious design flaw and a sad thing, since otherwise the game would be really interesting. Until that changes through an update or DLC and we can in fact build connected domes and by so cities on mars, the game is broken. Sadly.

It's just another RTS - nothing really special - except it's much slower. So, so, so, slow. I get you can "speed up time", but its still like walking through mud to play. In case you haven't caught my drift... this game is SLOW, with very little reward for all that waiting for things - because it's the same as every other RTS with a different skin.

Most of the problems that the March reviews listed, have been fixed as of the recent few patches, and a bunch of additional features have been added. I have about 16 hours in it so far and will put quite a few more. You will need to import quite a few advanced resources from Earth until you get the population and specialists needed for manning the advanced resource production facilities. In my latest (Russia) game, I think I exported about 240 rare metals for money for importing advanced resources before I was self sufficient enough to produce everything for myself. Regarding drones, you can now mass reassign them to a different hub, as well as pack them up at once hub and unpack them at another, even on the other side of the map. There is also a full fledged tutorial sequence for those who want it. You can set specialist buildings to only accept specialists, or everyone, and untrained buildings to only accept untrained, or everyone. Unfortunately, there is no 'prioritize workers for this specialist building' option yet.

The UI makes esp. the middle game very painful as you know what's wrong but you can't change it. Some game mechanics don't work e.g. building priorities. Vital electronics get loaded in low prio rockets instead of being used to repair high prio factories. Mystery events are interessting but add only very little to a playthrough aka start late, end early. TLDR: Pros: - interesting setting - everything is new and gets "explored" in the first playthrough Cons: - User Interface - User Interface - Game difficulty comes mostly from the User Interface - no real replay value apart from the short mystery events