This could be a nice chill game, just making alcohol and piling up cash, but some poor choices leave it terribly broken. The weather RNG is terrible, almost every year it just goes to one extreme or the other and stays there, and there is NOTHING you can do, it just wrecks your crop. 90% of the time you will end up with "fungal rot" which will reduce your harvest anywhere from 50-75% in addition to lowering the quality, and again, there is NOTHING you can do about it. Needless to say, it is very difficult to make any money this way, and that will be the first few hours of any new game. They should have called it "Fungal Rot Simulator." Competition is horribly unbalanced if you choose to include it. The CPU competitors start out with the full tech tree unlocked, including all the late-game crops and advances that you won't get for easily 50+ years. They just pile up money 20 times faster than your best-case maximum and buy up the available land, while you're on first-tier everything with fungal rot every year and struggling to make money at all. It's too bad, this was a neat concept, but so many basic things are completely busted that you wonder if they even played their own game for an hour or two before releasing it. Like, all they would need to do is dial down the RNG and it would be a completely different game, but as it is it's basically just a broken game.
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.
This game sucks. Let me repeat that in case it didn't sink in the first time: This game SUCKS. I was a huge fan of the original, and this is nothing like it. The graphics are better, of course, but that's the only thing going for it and it's not saying much. The gameplay has taken at least three steps back. It's just not very much fun to play this version. You want a remake of a classic game that keeps the essence of the original and improves it for modern times, this is not it. Try Sid Meier's Pirates or the new X-COM. This one will sit there collecting virtual dust.
