Review for Surviving Mars. Game for PC, Steam, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Linux, the video game was released on 15/03/2018
Explore, expand, colonize and make even the most hostile environments welcoming. These, in principle, were the cornerstones of development of our species. Now that our home planet has hardly any secrets left, the human race raises its eyes to new horizons out there, to the relatively nearby Red Planet. Surviving Mars will take us right there, to prepare the ground for Martian colonization!
Surviving Mars is a game that we could place halfway between an RTS (Real Time Strategy) and a management software. As you can easily guess from the title and our premise, we will be called to organize and manage a human colonization mission on Mars. It is a strategic one because, even if there are no enemy troops to defeat, we need to plan our every move very carefully, and management because we must also make the best use of our resources, both human and material.
Colonizing Martian soil is much easier said than done. Also because the operational core of the future settlement is on a single rocket and entrusted to drones and automated vehicles. Yes, before a man of flesh and blood can step on the sand of the Red Planet, we must properly prepare the accommodation and sustenance facilities thanks to our automated vanguard, then probe the ground, find and exploit resources and sources of energy and whatever else.
Our robots get along very well in these preparations and give us considerable help in the early stages, automatically dividing themselves between materials collection work, plant maintenance, etc. This does not mean that we have ready-made food, far from it! However, it is up to us to decide how to commit the scarce initial resources at our disposal, the various priorities to be assigned to the constructions and, not least, the type of constructions. Furthermore, we decide which areas on the planet to scan for materials and various anomalies and set funds and resources in the research.
It may be trivial, but we found ourselves, in the early stages of the game, stuck for an entire Martian night (the game has the night / day cycle and a dynamic system of geological and atmospheric events) because we are equipped only with gigantic parks of solar panels, which provide oodles of power during the day, but are literally offline in the dark.
The Earth, however, has not abandoned us to ourselves, since we still have the possibility to send (and send back) a variable number of transport rockets and, when the terrain and structures are completed, also passenger shuttles, loaded with settlers. , of which we will be able to select attitude, sex, knowledge and age before take-off, very important factors since each settler will react differently to his new life, going to influence the entire course of a game.
Of course, commuting between two planets costs and takes a long time, as does the refueling of the rocket to the colony. Other parameters therefore that we must carefully check.
Surviving Mars is an immersive game right from the start, but it puts the player in front of critical decisions even before they can welcome the settlers. Because it is extremely detailed and accurate, even at the level of scientific relevance. The graphics are rather essential, but it does its job very well, also giving us suggestive Martian glimpses, and is accompanied by an excellent sound sector and a truly immersive soundtrack!
The controls, especially on PlayStation 4 o Xbox One, they might be a bit confusing at first, but they don't represent any insurmountable obstacles. Excessive technicality and attention to the smallest handling details is a double-edged sword. If fans of management games or scientifically accurate space exploration find Surviving Mars practically perfect, more casual players may be blown away by certain aspects and the learning curve a bit tricky at first.
Surviving Mars is a great title from all points of view, which manages to demonstrate that this type of games is able to achieve excellent results even on consoles, as well as on the classics PC from gaming.
► Surviving Mars is a Management-type game - developed by Haemimont Games and published by Paradox Interactive for PC, Steam, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Linux, the game was released on 15/03/2018
