Surviving Mars Reviews
Surviving Mars is another shiny diamond in the chest of Paradox Interactive: a multi-faceted, well designed city builder with pretty unique approach and visuals. The gameplay is simple enough to get the attention of the player, but ultimately immersive and engaging.
Review in Italian | Read full review
A dearth of tutorials and a lack of consistent narrative can hamper the early stages of Surviving Mars. But have patience and this city builder emerges as an entertaining and addictive experience with tons of replay value and a dark streak of humour.
Playing Surviving Mars is like watching someone put a kitten in a plastic bubble. It's cute for a while, wobbling around in its new environment. But then you realize that the kitten is going to suffocate, and you are going to spend hours watching it slowly run out of air and die. Trying to get the kitten out of the bubble is hopeless. You don't know anything about bubbles, and the kitten isn't telling you. Have fun, kids!
Surviving Mars is a great game of management and survival, combining both facets to achieve a unique title only available in console.
Review in Spanish | 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.
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
Surviving Mars is a superb management game. With City Skylines (another Paradox production), it's simply the best in its genre, thanks to a deep gameplay, big content, nice visuals, great concept and mods compatibility.
Review in French | Read full review
Surviving Mars is a solid city-builder, but some areas of the game require too much micromanagement and some critical information is either inaccurate or not presented in a useful way.
Surviving Mars is a pleasant economic strategy game with pretty graphics, atmospheric music, and a very captivating gameplay. Setting up various martian colonies provides tons of fun, especially in the beginning. In the later stages of the game, it seems a bit weird to play, but this might be caused by the fact that the full potential of this game has not been realized yet.
Review in Polish | Read full review
I'm in a weird place because I know that Surviving Mars is probably excellent for someone who is not me. If you enjoy Paradox games like Crusader Kings II but not city builders, then this is probably a great bridge for you to relax and play. If you like managing numbers, resources, and people, then this is the game for you. What I wanted was a more freeform experience that allowed me to design and fiddle with Martian landscapes to my heart's content, and this is not the game for that.
In addition to offering up a rewarding and enjoyable sci-fi city-building experience, Surviving Mars is rife with detail.
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 is a challenging yet engaging city builder that makes me want to colonize Mars again and again.
Colonization of Mars according to the concepts from the late 20th century. Retro-futuristic graphics and outdated ideas mix into an engaging game, although there is a lot of room for improvement.
Review in Polish | Read full review
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.
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
A solid strategy game that may suffer slightly from being, as with the surface of Mars, a little too dry
A very good, yet slightly enraging experience.
The first few hours of Surviving Mars are frustrating and the game can come across a bit disappointing; stick with it though and once you have figured out what to do all by yourself – due to the ineffective tutorial tips – the game opens up and almost becomes a completely different experience.
Overall, Surviving Mars is a solid building simulator. Its numerous options for gameplay leave room for all kinds of play styles. Player choices maintain key roles in how they wish to shape their societies. A vast array of technology makes room for endless infrastructure combinations with a wonderful level of detail. A lack of content really brings down the game a few notches because the gameplay begins to feel repetitive after a while. Although the title has a lot of awesome details with science fiction flair, it doesn't bring any new surprises after a single playthrough. Whether players are seeking a challenging simulation or a chill Martian sandbox, Surviving Mars is a title that is worth a try.