I love this game. The marriage of Paradox Interactive and Haemont studios is a match made in heaven. Let's start with the theme. Mars is a great setting for a city-builder, but Surviving Mars takes it a step further, with its retro-utopian art style and mood. The gameplay strikes a good balance (imho) between automating the tedious stuff and giving the player interesting decisions to make. The game also revolves around disasters. In most city builders disasters are a way of adding to the challenge and breaking up the monotony of business as usual. That's not how disasters are conceived of in Surviving Mars. Rather, a lot of your colony planning revolves around the inevitability of disasters. Disasters are not things to react to, as in most games, but something to plan for. Currently there are four types of disasters (dust storms, dust devils, meteor showers and cold waves), and each of them threatens the viability of your colony in different ways. I've seen some reviews which complain that the game is very punishing in that, if one thing goes wrong, your whole colony might fail. While this is true, I don't see that as a bad part of the game. Mars is not a hospitable environment. You need to think ahead about the future needs of your colony as you expand and ensure that you don't run out of a critical resource. Don't start building a ton of wind turbines if you haven't set up a steady supply of machine parts. Don't bring heaps of colonists prior to establishng a large enough food supply. And always make sure that you have enough water - which is extremely scarce on Mars. Without it you can't work your farms, or synthesize fuel, or keep your colonists hydrated. Other notable features: Brilliant soundtrack. Cool techs with a unique take on tech progression. Lots of flexibility about how the game is played in terms of difficulty, types of disasters, special game rules. On-going development. The dev team is extremely responsive to feedback.
