Finished this today, 100% terraformation, all reseaches and megaprojects done and...it's all, and doing all of those is boring. There's no any difficulties in this game, you just need to wait. If you suffer of not enoght resources - just finish some buildings and wait. If tons of your colonists died - you need to wait for new one. If they departing - you just need to wait, no need to worry about that, it's not a problem.
Maybe good for some players, but too casual for me.
It seems to me that this game has been getting a worse reviews than it deserves. It has enjoyable city building mixed with interesting logistic planning that feels like it really matters due to the scarcity of your resources. The achievements are fun and it seems to me that the game offers plenty of content. You'll be doing the same thing over and over again (but isn't that just how city building works?), but you will have different circumstances to overcome each time, which keeps the game interesting for me. It's not quite a casual game due to the planning required, but it's not quite a heavy management sim either due to the fairly focused scope of your objectives. I could see the micromanagement getting tiresome, but otherwise I'm really enjoying this experience. I might recommend waiting for a sale if you're on the fence, but I'm very happy with my purchase. If you're intregued by the prospect of a fairly approachable "hard sci-fi" simulation of what will hopefully be humanity's next foothold in the universe, I would recommend giving this a shot. I would rate my experience 5 stars were it not for the lack of cloud save support.
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.
I purchased the digital deluxe season pass during GOG summer sales rather than space colony package (because it's just giving me the basic version) and I think it's the best choice I ever did. This game alone gave me hours of fun managing my colony on Mars. The type of "I started at 9 in the morning and where the sun goes?" kind of game. Sure it's started kinda slow in the beginning but it start to pacing is better as your colony is up and running. The limited resources is difficulty is a toss up between easy and hard. Some resources can be imported from earth but at later game when very important resource like water is depleted you need to find other source ASAP and the right research to get new source of water due to large amount of water demands. The natural disasters also gave you a good enough challenge (and I got both sandstorm and meteor shower at the same time).
Even with all those challenges the game gave me advanced warnings so if something wrong happened it's my own fault (no, this is not the dark soul of city building game, that title still held by Dwarf Fortress) so as long I anticipate the warnings I can reduce or stop the problem. The only time I effed bad was during water crisis during sandstorm and meteor shower combo event and people died of dehydration.
Enough with the praise and let's talk about the cons. The game is great but there's still problems that bother me. The first one is the dome interconnectivity. Sure domes can connect via tunnels but turn out there's also area of influence for each dome so people refused to live in domes a bit too far away and it's hard when some domes are pretty cramped during the last part of the game, Regarding birth rate of Martians even though I knew it's a small amount of people in the colony but I felt that they are less sexually active and Martian born kids are so low in number I had to keep recruiting people from earth to man many facilities even during late game where I have big enough population.
I play the game but every time i start a it, i feel like somthing is missing.
This game fills all parameters for an unfinised/rushed MVP (Minimum Viable Product) so much potential but ther is somthing missing @ the core.
I dont dislike this kinde of aproach but the core gameplay is not realy fun.
