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.
The game is alternating between fights that are too easy and fights that are too hard. Character development sucks. Very often, the game is just plain boring (e.g. walls of text all the time, useless NPC "Touch the Soul", dull quests). Oh, btw: you will spend more time in front of the loading screen than actually playing the game. Every tiniest little map (second floor of a house) requires loading. Getting from that second floor back outside, load screen times two. You get the picture. Pricing for the game is too high (AAA title) for what you get (unpolished indie game).
The quests are so bug ridden that you cannot complete a large number of them, quest-related narrative is useless - either you spend days figuring out something (that may not work at all due to a bug) or you find the solution online. The fights come in two flavours: way too easy and too hard, nothing in between. Some of the surface effects are simply annoying, they have over-complicated things. For example, 90% of the time in harder fights your healing potions will kill your or at least damage you severely. Also, some fights literally can take over an hour - I have no time or patience for such a grind. Crafting, which was great in D:OS 1 is completely lack luster here. All the polish the first part had is sadly missing here. I suggest to come back to this game in six months or so, maybe they have ironed out the worst bugs by then.
The game is too easy most of the time, to the point where it gets mindnumbingly boring. With the first really difficult main mission ("Rescue Attempt") the difficulty suddenly goes up by 400% or so. To be able to survive here, you need to gain access to the second sector and upgrade to MK3 equipment. Your flight skills matter not, as this game has a ridiculous flight model (two-dimensional flight in space!!!) with sluggish controls. So to get the equipment needed, you have to do a ton of grinding to earn the money. No thanks. What totally turned me off from the game is the lack of game save management. There is no option to save a game to a certain file, it only auto-saves when you dock or exit the game. I found out the hard way that there is only ONE saved game status. On a high risk mission, this piece of garbage software put the mission-board mission RIGHT ON TOP of the unmanageable "Rescue Attempt" mission. I suddenly found myself with two high risk missions in the same place and attacked from all sides. Not survivable. Exiting the game to cool down for a minute was my mistake. The only game I could load was the one where I sat in the non-survivable fix. No other save existed. Uninstalled, sorry about the two days I wasted on this. I got the game for free in some GOG sale. I got exactly what I paid for. Why can I not give zero stars?
