Tharsis Reviews
There would be a good story to be had if Tharsis was developed to involve more than just trying to survive a few rounds. The theme of surviving on a spaceship and figuring out how to keep everything—and everyone—together should make for a good game. Unfortunately, Tharsis fails on too many points to be really worth playing.
Tharsis is a time-waster. Nonetheless it is a time-waster that's thoroughly recommended wasting time on - particularly good for fans of strategy and decision-based titles.
It’s a great concept for a turn-based strategy game but be prepared for its unforgiving nature because you’re definitely going to die more than you survive.
If you’re looking for a challenging and brutal strategy game to play at home and/or on the go, Tharsis is for you. With your entire world literally breaking down all around you, tough decisions must be made and your morality will be pushed to its limit, should you save the ship or sacrifice a crew member to prolong the life of those still alive? With its newly revamped difficulty modes, the Nintendo Switch edition makes it a little bit easier for newcomers whilst still being just as challenging as I recall on the PS4. Despite how frustrating and unforgiving the game can be, just remember; in space, nobody can hear you scream…
Overall I liked Tharsis. It’s a fun, but short experience, that has you managing resources and trying to keep your crew alive. Yes there is some replay value as there are a few different endings it’s still not enough. I do think with some tweaking this would make a really good single-player board game that I would gladly play.
Tharsis is one of those games with a different approach, interesting and with the necessary complexity to invite the player to throw in all the hours of the world.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
When it comes to strategy games there are crowds with pretty different tastes out there...
Tharsis is a turn-based survival and strategy game based on dice roll. It is a complex and difficult game, where in addition to doing everything correctly, we must be very lucky not to lose the game. It is addictive as we learn to play and progress in decision making and problem solving, but our margin of error is almost non-existent, and really, because of the weight of the random variable, we will never end up having control over what it happens in the game.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Tharsis would be a game I would enjoy playing on a tabletop with some buddies, while drinking some beers, and enjoying our repeated failures. However, as a single-player video game, with only a few extra missions to take you out of the basic gameplay loop that is consistently frustrating, the overall experience has all the right parts but just leaves too much up to chance to be enjoyable.
Tharsis is a good yet difficult strategy game that takes a lot of time to master.
Tharsis isn't a game for everyone. Strategy may be an important factor in determining how long you'll survive, but luck plays a much bigger role in things toward the end. The game is punishingly difficult early on, but it throws you a bone every now and then with character unlocks that can make things feel different. With the likelihood of failing more often than winning due to streaks of near-impossible situations, some may be disenchanted from the get-go. For those who love to conquer big challenges, this digital board game can be very appealing.
Tharsis is a captivating but sadistic game of chance that puts your fate at the mercy of dice.
With a few tweaks and maybe a more casual-friendly difficulty level, Tharsis could be a fun strategy alternative for those who don't enjoy building large kingdoms or waging wars that take hours to complete. In its current state however, Tharsis is little more than a sadistically cruel game of digital roulette.
If you're a fan of constant raising stakes with no reprieve, then this is certainly the sort of thing that will appeal to you. Even if not, it will still appeal, but in smaller doses. Either way, Tharsis is a compelling, but polarizing, game.
Jokes aside, Tharsis is an incredibly meaningful game that has picked a woefully inadequate format to express an innately intelligent idea. If this was a narrative game, in the vein of Telltale Games' work or Life is Strange, then we really would have had something special on our hands. As it is, we have a board game that goes out of its way to be unfair so it can make players make decisions that should have great emotional impact, but in practice become a quite pragmatic stepping stone towards victory.
Tharsis can never stop reminding you that you don't have control over its interstellar disaster, just the illusion of it. Every time I watched my ship fall apart, and every time I watched new events propagate across the ship that were completely impossible to stop, I felt like, win-or-lose, Tharsis was having all the fun.
Tharsis offers some interesting mechanics, a story with little innovation but plenty of space for the player to create his narrative, and a lot of replayability but all of that comes at a price: the difficulty level that can make players abandon the title before they see everything it has to offer.
A turn based strategy that actually employs strategy, Tharsis is a rougelike you'll want to keep coming back to.
e told, we took a few extra days to finish this review in hopes that we'd beat the "normal" difficulty's 10 rounds even once. As of press time, we've yet to get past round 8. That is a huge asterisk for this game's appeal; the overwhelming role of luck rarely presents a clean feeling that you've accumulated real skill or progress. As a result, you'll quite honestly need at least two dozen sessions before you come to grips with a range of successful strategies, and therefore, the feeling that this isn't just a fancy-looking exercise in just rolling dice and dying. (We're hopeful that the upcoming free "missions" mode will offer these exact kinds of progress morsels, but Choice Provisions hasn't announced when we should expect those to launch.)
For the board game people, they will find this to be more up their alley. People looking for a more action type experience will have to look elsewhere. If you do decide to pick it up, just keep in mind, it is brutal, unforgiving, and takes a lot of patience to get into. When you do, you may very well find some enjoyment out of it maybe two times out of ten.