CHENNAI: Surviving Mars comes from good stock. It’s developed by Haemimont Games, who’ve put out the last three Tropico games, and it’s published by Paradox Interactive, best known for Cities: Skylines, Crusader Kings II and a game I recently wrote about here, Stellaris. So the pedigree’s there, but does this game live up to it? In Surviving Mars, you’re tasked with getting a functioning Martian colony off the ground and up and running.
In the beginning, all you’ve got are drones, rovers and a rocket’s worth of supplies — and from those building blocks, you’ve got to put together a colony capable of supporting the human colonists which will be on their way from Earth all too soon. Knowing what to do is often a luxury in Surviving Mars — more often you’ll have to muddle your way toward achieving your short-term goals. The game doesn’t go out of its way to make things easy for you, and Mars is (as you’d imagine) a fairly hostile environment too. That steep learning curve also helps boost your sense of achievement, however, as you manage to carve your name in the Martian soil in some small way.
In the beginning, you need to set up the infrastructure necessary for human colonists to survive on the surface. That’s a notinconsiderable task in itself, but once you’ve accomplished that is where things get really complicated. Keeping humans occupied and happy is a much tougher task than merely setting up a power grid or creating a workable water/oxygen harvesting industry. This is where the DNA of some of those other games I mentioned upfront start showing through, as you try frantically to juggle the various needs of your fledgling and oh-so-vulnerable colony.
There’s so, so much to talk about here and I’ve really only scratched the surface. There’s an insane amount of variability from game to game — not only can you change the agency that’s backing you (giving you different starting resources and aptitudes for your colonists) and your own personality (giving you different special powers), but you can also choose (or randomise) the storyline you will be playing through. Yes, there are elements of a story in this game - and, although I haven’t gotten too far into this aspect of it, it seems both intriguing and something that’s best viewed as a bonus. (You’ll be too busy trying to stay alive.) As should be abundantly clear by this point, Surviving Mars is not going to be for everybody.
It wastes no time holding your hand and steering you through its intricacies. I’ve lost two colonies at this point — one to a meteor storm, and one because I realised just how badly I’d crewed up so I was forced to reset — but the third one is... well, ‘thriving’ would be a bit much. ‘Surviving’, let’s say. Keeping it going has been like balancing on a knife edge (without having ever seen a knife before, or understanding the concept of gravity), but I’ve had an absolute blast every step of the way.