Surviving Mars Reviews
If you're a fan of city-building gameplay Surviving Mars is a must-buy title. Even if you prefer a more creative experience you can tailor the difficulty to that end, or ramp up the scarcity for a true survival experience, where battling the elements almost feels more like a real-time strategy.
Surviving Mars does not speak to the casual gamer, but it's also a good city-builder. Its creators Haemimont Games deeply love science-fiction, and they demonstrated it by giving their game a variety of scenarios together with its citybuilder nature. It deserves time to be appreciated, but seeing your colony become operative is always a satisfaction. Veterans could find a relatively new way to see science-fiction on their genre. Due to rigid gamepad controls, newcomers may consider the PC.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Haemimont Games delivers a Sci Fi RTS deep and original. But Surviving Mars is hard on the control side (al least console version) and we miss some more variety.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Surviving Mars combines so many interesting mechanics and genres but seems to lack the overall depth that defines more specialized titles. Nevertheless, it's an entertaining romp in exploration, survival and colonization that's good for a couple dozen hours or so.
Surviving Mars tasks you with leading humanity's first colonies on the Red Planet. But Mars is hardly forgiving, and it will fight you every step of the way.
Fun and interesting, Surviving Mars is a kind-of-SimCity in the Mars surface that challenges the player to create his own civilization, buildings and survival system, adding some exploration mechanics.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Underneath the lack of a proper tutorial and some odd interface decisions, there’s a neat game with an almost puzzle-like feel to it that hits some sweets spots when it comes to optimizing a colony for long-term survival. Shame the same cant be said about its colonists’ management / interaction.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Based out of Bulgaria, Haemimont Games has made the last three Tropico outings, Omerta – City of Gangsters, and 2015’s Victor Vran. Their experience with city builders in a dangerous setting – as with Tropico – show in this speculative colonization game. While the dangers are less political and more dust tornado shaped in Surviving Mars, one danger stood above the rest. Like a lab-created black hole completely out of control, I was sucked in. Hours of my stream seemed to vanish before my eyes as I struggled convincing colonists not to abandon me to the strange red landscape, with only peppy radio host to keep me company.
Successful and challenging construction game, which gets more complex with increasing playing time, but also brings a few quirks with it.
Review in German | Read full review
Ultimately Surviving Mars is a fantastic simulation and strategy game. Again, it might be off-putting inexperienced players, and advanced players will likely need to find their own fun in the long term by creating obstacles for themselves to overcome or to seek out mods, lest it gets repetitive.
I've enjoyed the freedom to make my own decisions and mistakes, the challenge, the complexity, the attention to detail. It's been one hell of a ride.
A soft-science city-building game set on the red planet, Surviving Mars takes Elon Musk's dreams and makes them a reality. Occasionally clunky controls on the PS4 don't mar a game that adds the storyline of 'mysteries' to the usual resource gathering and settlement managing simulation, with a few twists.
Surviving Mars requires patience and experimentation that may be daunting to those new to the genre. The lack of detail on the game's many mechanics in conjunction with the intense micromanagement creates a challenging and frustrating experience. There are ways to make your colonization mission less difficult, but a well-planned strategy still needs to be in place to succeed. Despite this, once the mechanics click, the game is incredibly satisfying and rewarding. All of this is packaged with a simple aesthetic and decent soundtrack that are both stylish and fit its sci-fi theme. If you're a fan of city builders, Haemimont Games' latest is worth playing.
Surviving Mars isn't simply SimCity set on our red neighbor Mars. It's a resource management game with a heavy emphasis on survival, involving lots of death and brutal mechanics. At the same time, its systems are designed to teach the player how best to strategize and learn from past mistakes. A potential play time of 100+ hours to see each mystery play out also ensures a ton of entertainment return on a meager investment of ~$40 USD. For those who love the city-sim genre, this is a no-brainer.
For simulation game fanatics, Surviving Mars is an easy recommendation. For everyone else, if you are willing to sink in the time and the effort, you'll be happy in your new home on the red planet.
Haemimont Games and Paradox Interactive's Surviving Mars mixes the best of the 4X and city building simulation game into a futuristic package, but its weak end-game might bore some. Thankfully the game has mod support on PC and enough achievements for console players to last.
Surviving Mars has a lot of interface annoyances and other small issues, but its blend of optimism and dread makes a compelling foundation for a city/colony builder.
The Tropico team plays it relatively straight on the red planet - but trouble is never far away.
________________________ “Every action needs to be carefully considered in Surviving Mars
Surviving Mars has the interplanetary foundations of a good strategy game, but it gets bogged down in its own complexity, micromanagement, and a surprisingly bland setting.