Per Aspera

Bought this game cuse it looked interesting and it absolutely was! its also very relaxing with a pretty interesting story to the campaign.

I got this for 2 dollars on a sale and for the price its great. The graphics and the storyline are immersive and great. It doesnt hold much replay value aside completing the story, because the game despite trying to look strategic requires very little micro or calculation and its almost impossible to make a mistake which could lose you your game.

At current time, I cannot recommend the game. Still cannot

this is an ok city builder. The tutorial misses a few things so for a long time I was only developing engineering technology because i'm too dumb to realize there were other pages for example.

I enjoy the story/theme with AI taking our jobs its kinda fun to play as an AI discovering itself :p

Hmm. it was fun till it wasnt. Definitely not the most intuitive combat controls.

Started out okay, but then got to a point where it wanted me to launch a satellite but I couldn't because there was no spaceport free and I couldn't build one. Also I don't understand how to research other highlighted sites in the general area. I click on build research centre but nothing ever gets built. I find the voice of the AI rather annoying. I'll give it another go at some point but to me it is a bit meh.

Nice, especially on sale. Enjoyable and takes around 20h to finish the story, which is surprisingly good. Can have quite a bit downtime though where you just sit and wait for something to finish.

The gameplay is simplistic; short production chains, trivial "combat", often repetitive building. Sounds and music are nothing special, they do their job. The story tries to be deep, but the twists just aren't that interesting and the torrent of messages gets annoying quickly. The art style is great, I liked the sketchy presentation of the Martian surface. The game offers just enough fun and challenge for the time it takes to complete it. It doesn't overstay its welcome and can be finished in a day or two. Recommended on a deep discount, if you're a fan of the theme and genre. Otherwise, your money is better spent on something more complex.

Nice story, great graphic, Mars looks stunning and I'm missing one thing - list of the buildings to easily manage them by type. UI for charts and env management could be also better.

Is gewd.

buy it on sale ig

Lots of fun and nice story

Pretty good. Got my first colony to fail slowly as all the worker drones got damaged and couldnt produce anymore anymore drones. Another failed attempted at a mars colony.

A little more on the passive side but still good progression system with lots of different ways to progress.

i love this game so much

This is a seriously fantastic game! Its easily one of the top RTS/Base Builders Ive played, ever.
Per Aspera really puts the 'science' in science fiction, and is extremely challenging. Even on easy mode the expansiveness of this game will have you scratching your head at what to do next. When my base gets really big I have to slow down speed regularly and even pause and reassess my whole base frequently. The different phases of terraforming almost make it feel like multiple games within a single game at times, as the goals really vary (ie; expansion and resources early, with much more atmospheric management later, and a healthy dose of research stations to see whats what.)
Overall, despite not having particularly very many hours in this game so far, I give it a solid 9/10 with Blue Mars included. Its incredibly thought provoking and I found it very mentally stimulating. Praise be to teh devs for this fantastic gem!

mind warping i like it

i've been on a hunt for a martian resource manager that scratches that specific itch and so far per aspera is killing it. also pleasantly surprised that the story is pretty engaging esp for a sim and god damnit troy baker you cant keep getting away with playing father figures i am SOBBING

This game is very similar to Surviving Mars however this game... feels better even though they are technically different games this one is less of a Paradox Games Nightmare filled with bad DLCs and a small or non-existant pool of gameplay and interesting lore to comb through which this game has both of the latter in full force and that just makes me happy!

Very enjoyable for the full 20 hours I put into it. Fun city building mechanic, fun storyline, and the "realistic" difficulty was fairly easy but I probably wouldn't have been happier with the higher difficulty.

The only thing that caught me was that the research tree had a scroll bar I didn't notice until the very end. It cuased my last 2 hours to drag a little bit as I had to catch up on my missing technology.

This game has more dialog and phone calls than my marriage. Just STFU and let me play already. I had to play this one with voice audio off and skipped all the conversations. All of them. The entire ecosystem fell on its face because maintenance drones are the stupidest AI in the game. No wait the stupidest AI in the game would have to be the worker drones, yes those little time vampires have the combined IQ of my fish tank. Game was fun until it was not, that was a period of about a week. Had great starting replay potential but this one goes into the dust vault.

I love this game

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ok

got it on sale and it was totally worth it!
loved the pace, the story, explorations.
really nice terraforming visuals.

Liked the storyline. Nice mix of building and problem solving. Tech tree advance made sense.

basically they turned the kim stanley robinson trilogy into a city-builder. there's a ton of production value here in the voice acting, the UI, and the general visual design. but it's pretty lacking in gameplay mechanics, game system transparency, and the logistics model.

buildings don't clearly show their production/consumption rates. the worker-territory system is limiting, buggy, and a huge step down if you're used to other logistics games with more sophisticated controls

still, it's compelling. there's a long core game loop of dealing with the consequences of your own actions. like, ice is a limited resource, which pushes you to flood mars, which in turn forces you to retreat from the rising waters, but then opens up liquid water as a resource.

if you're willing to deal with the logistics jank it's worth at least one playthrough

fun game, chill and intense at time. Makes me wish we would stop trying to kill each other and satisfy the rich fuckers and get off this planet and become explorers.

I want very badly to like this game. It's a fascinating terraforming journey, with challenging logistical issues, long-term planning, complex interplay of mechanics, and the pleasure of watching Mars turn from a frozen airless wasteland into a verdant world. It's also a coming-of-age story of a cybernetic intelligence doing the best she can, despite her mission and existence becoming political almost as soon as she booted up.

Unfortunately, these experiences are ruined by a pair of game-breaking transport bugs and a painful and easily fixable quality-of-life issue involving storage, which are still unfixed over a year after I reported them despite a much-touted anniversary bugfix update, as well as a host of minor QoL issues. There are also some missed opportunities with story-gameplay interaction, but the transport bugs and storage headache are the real problems.

If you do go ahead and buy this game, you need to keep a paranoid eye on your construction projects to make sure progress is actually being made on them. Also, be sure to get the Blue Mars dlc as well as the base game, as many resources will be lost to you without it.

Until this game can be relied on to actually build what you order built, I can't recommend it.

An exciting economic strategy game with a pleasant gameplay.
The game evokes associations with dreams of the future and colonization of Mars, as in the 1990 film" Total Recall".
Main save - before plot selection to see all three endings.
Simple and pleasant achievement system.

The AI for the worker drones in this game are MIND NUMBINGLY stupid. They will literally do anything EXCEPT what you tell them to do. I ended up in a situation where the worker bots refused to make more worker bots, and since they die from wear and tear they quickly started dying off. I found myself down to my very last worker drone, which still won't build more workers despite be constantly putting priority on building worker drones and turning off half of the base to get it to do what I want.

This has been a problem since launch and the developers STILL haven't fixed this issue. Don't waste you time and money on this game. It sucks

So far at 9 hours in I'm enjoying this game quite a bit. I enjoy expanding the base and keeping the production balanced, which is easy enough (for now). The story is quite interesting as well, which I didn't expect. The developers have done a good job making the story tie in with the progression of the game, while keeping things mysterious and interesting. I can't wait to find out what lies beyond! Per Aspera!

This game is fun and feels like a video game version of the board game Terraforming Mars.

In general, I enjoy city building/resource management games, but sometimes they get to a point where I'm not quite sure where else to take my city and I lose interest. The addition of the storyline to Per Aspera really creates a fantastic balance in my opinion. I never had the opportunity to get bored or lose interest because I always wanted to see what was coming next. Even now, as I've completed the primary storyline, I want to keep building and fully colonizing Mars.

Regarding the Blue Mars DLC, I'll echo what many others have said in that yes, they probably should have just included it in the base game. But it's a neat addition and I'd certainly encourage you to pick it up along with the base game, especially if it's on sale.

Playability, graphics, storyline, mechanics... I'm impressed with all of it. I'll be looking forward to seeing what's next on the horizon for Tlön Industries.

So they made it too Mars and got a colony going. Is this a different timeline where Elon Musk didnt exist ?

weird elon cock sucking and just generally pretentious

I highly recommend you go into this game blind. Buy the game and start to play. It is so masterfully paced that I can't stop playing. It is the definition of that "one more turn" type of game.

Started playing to build a mars industry, Finished for the story. Absolutely awesome game 10/10

A well made game, integrating the story in the learn to play experience seamlessly. Well worth the time (and probably money).

I had a few problems with the final stages and with population control, Another anoying thing was the waitingç you had to wait a lot for things to happen, the x16 speed buttom will be your fast friend soon. Because waiting. But other than that, this provided a very good mars colonization experience.

This is a true masterpiece.

Pros

• I can't even tell you about the cons because I objectively can't remember a significant one.
  
• This game is simple like a piece of cakeski. Very friendly for new players, and it has the most understandable tutorial I have ever seen in my life.
  
• Plot: I like the plot. Everything is literally thought out. You have three endings, and when you do something different, the dialogues are not the same.
  
• Sound: The sounds are wonderful. This applies to both the soundtrack and the voice acting.
  
• AI: The AI quality is high. However, you have to set priorities for it.
  
• Other stuff: The real model of Mars features actual craters and pits, and some of the findings you will encounter are also real, including the Curiosity rover and others.

Cons

8/10. The game is pretty text book example of a building game and a logistics simulation game. It is interesting enough to play through at least once since the story is quite interesting, the voice acting is excellent, and terraforming work shows up in the planet scale quite nicely. However, the content is pretty front-loaded, for the latter part of the story you just mostly expand and stamp out copies of stuff to keep the production chugging to complete the terraforming objectives.

There are also some issues; some technologies are simply worse than others so they end up being trap options or waste of limited resources, and you will most likely complete the story with only about 3/4 of the technologies unlocked. Had this game gotten an end-game, or after-the-terraforming story DLC this would be one of the better ones in genre, now it is more or less "one and done" deal with the story mode.

Great premise, terrible execution.

I really wanted to like this game, however it's redeeming qualities are few and far between. What is trying to be exactly is the true puzzle of the game. A logistics game with terrible logistics, a colonization game where colonization doesn't have much weight or impact outside of research, or a terraforming game with arbitrary and terribly communicated mechanics?
It feels like this game strives to check boxes instead of being good at *something*. It tries to be horizontal in its approach when other games taking the vertical route excel better in every way. There are better games in every approach this game attempts.

So, the pros:
People like the story and voice acting, personally I found it to be a pointless slog that contributes little to the game overall.
It looks nice.

Cons:
Logistics - so critical to the game yet awful in execution, most of this game is spent waiting for resources to go through unfixable bottlenecks.
Terraforming - pain in the ass, terribly communicated issues leads to cascading problems that are difficult to fix
Colonizing - simply a pain both due to logistic issues and seemingly arbitrary immigation/emmigration
THAT FUCKING DLC - a large amount of the planet becomes covered in water rendering most of the map unusable without the blue planet dlc. Also, the boat have the worst AI in the entite game, a half-assed dlc that should be in the base game
Speed - I leave this at max speed and most of the game is just spent waiting, waiting on ridiculous large projects to finish, waiting on resources, waiting for shit to build, waiting just cause your waiting. Just waiting.

Just play something else

Finished the game after 45 hours. It was what I wanted - no stress, slow, colonization / terraforming game of Mars. It should be noted that it is more about the terraforming than about the colonization. Story was there, but not really strong one.

I got this puppy for $8! Quite the value for this game. Yah, it's not perfect. AI is lacking and there's a couple of things bout the interface that annoy me, but it also has some really powerful parts to it for managing all of your buildings. I wish there were a few more stats but overall I'd give it a 9 out of 10 on a curve. I don't think I've ever found an interface in a game that didn't annoy me in one way or another. Designing interfaces must be difficult. Anywho, the game runs rock solid, the story line is really good and there are several different phases you have to go through to achieve the mission. To accomplish all the goals takes a long time but I enjoyed the long haul. Still haven't reached 1 mil pop but working on it. I really enjoy it because there aren't a thousand recipes you need to learn. It's pretty simple in that regard but getting the correct balance of elements can be a little bit challenging. Production, output and storage are really important items to focus on. I highly recommend you make sure to learn this part of the game as it will help immensely. Materials basically don't go away and there is no way to destroy them so you really have to try and maintain a balance. Probably best game I've played for that price and it seems they always have the game on sale. I definitely enjoyed it much more than Surviving Mars. Kudos to the developers.

Fun game but later it gets incredibly tedious without the means to automate some tasks. Mods can help with this (especially the one that allows upgrading worker stations to hold more workers).

If you can forgive it for a few shortcomings in the user interface and combat that can be worked around you'll be able to enjoy this gem and its unique and well polished aesthetic. I often find myself playing at 1x speed instead of the insane x16 speed it offers, because it is fun to just take it slow and carefully look at where to grow and where to prune. This team has really achieved something with this game.

My main gripe is with the road upgrading interface, which requires many clicks. I wish it just had a button or a shortcut and you could click the roads you want to upgrade. But no, you have to click on a building to reveal the upgrade button. Now you go into the traffic overlay to see what road needs paving, and the tool is suddenly canceled. The way around this is to not micromanage the roads, but rather to make an overall plan of where you want traffic to go, as the bots will follow the fastest path. You can also hold ctrl and click multiple buildings and easily connect them that way.

Then there's the balancing issues. I've played the campaign twice and each time I ran out of aluminium. The solution is to start pruning parts of your base to regain the aluminium, but this wasn't really obvious as most games don't refund all your resources when doing this. The campaign makes me feel locked up, as it doesn't allow you to use the entire planet. It rushes you and takes control from you when you are having a chill time, and it punishes you and locks you up if you are going too fast. I've realized that playing sandbox is much better. Once you know the game you can always roleplay the campaign.

Then there's the combat. It's just not fun. It's just throwing numbers at numbers, it's slow, it's not exciting. To me it appears as a hurried feature that should never have been added. It's just bolted on there in the campaign in order to create some drama but I think this was a mistake. It's best to just avoid the campaign when first playing as you'll be able to play peacefully then. As I mentioned before you can always roleplay it later and focus on the story, and then the military tech branch might be a fun little extra flavor.

That being said, it looks and sounds and feels amazing, it's a game I occasionally return to because it has that unique thing, dare I say akin to Stronghold. There are plenty of well balanced, polished and well rounded Mars colony games out there that just don't offer you that spark.

Fun, neat story, beautiful game.

I hate to give this game a thumbs down but these devs need a slap on the wrist. First of all I loved this game!! let's list why:

-Great interesting story with tons of intrigue like a metal gear solid game. Got some great voice actors too, very lengthy with different choices to spice it up

-Good music though there aren't many tracks

-clean appealing graphics that are a joy to look at for hours

-addictive as a schedule 1 substance. The first time I played it was on the weekend and for the 1st time in years I played a game so long that I stayed up all night and only quit when my eyes just couldn't take it anymore. Per Methra is what I started calling it the week I vegged out with this game

-replayability is decent, it would be nonexistent if there weren't story choices and different ways to go about terraforming

-amazing setting and concept

SO WHY THE THUMBS DOWN?
Let's start with the big stuff:

-audio is broken.. it's synced up the frame rate and economy.. so it your frames aren't great with a thousand buildings then your audio isn't either, supper choppy.. and I've gotten into a death spiral where my planet has too much oxygen and everything started burning so my power plants broke and for some reason when power is very low the audio freaks out

-blue planet DLC is one of the scummiest DLC of all time.. just adds 2 buildings and let's you build your mines and wind farms on water.. which is litterally the same building as on land but they have orange square platforms underneath to let you know they are "floating".

-the buildings can be very indistinct.. and finding where something is can take a long time because the game provides you nothing to find your buildings or colonies... Even spaceports that show up as a icon in space can't be found because it's so hard to tell what spaceport is doing what job.. it's a real chore to find your way around.. the mine looks like the factory that looks like the drone hive.. you usually end up clustering buildings together in a certain way to make it easier for yourself.

-icons are a mess.. at first it seems simple.. 6 basic resources.. 7 commodities made from factories. Easy.. except it's not.. it can be very hard to find where your aluminum mines are and where your carbon mines are.. the icons that show up on your map to help you find them get layered and change with buildings on top of them.. some buildings like the drone hive just look like a carbon mine from above.. it's a mess.. eventually you get use to looking at the mess and memorizing your way around but the icons should never change if a building is placed on a resource! Makes no sense!

-as the planet evolves buildings can get destroyed or isolated as the seas rise.. when this happens there is no way to get rid of the building... You can try to scrap it but workers can't get to it.. so it just sits there.. taking up your building count.

-There's no graphs for how water is rising.. this can be very frustrating because half the time you are building on Land that will one day be an ocean.. so maybe your whole new water treatment coastal network could get destroyed because the water rises much faster than you anticipated..

-tooltips are missing everywhere and certain things like pressing tab to see altitude/coordinates are never explained. Shift clicking buildings is never explained. Some of the charts they give you are just useless like building count.. while others are missing entirely like sea rise.. when placing hyperloops the line tells you that 2 hyperloops are connected.. but when you finish building them you have to find them (finding stuff is hard) and manually connect them

-economics are broken. Some things cost way too much resources like repair drones.. and if you end up producing too much oxygen or radiation you could get in a death spiral where nothing gets repaired and always breaks from fires.. Upgrading roads is insanely expensive.. and your workers are slow even at 16x speed and you could be sitting around quite a bit waiting for buildings to get built. Sometimes construction just won't happen unless you prioritize them.. so that new mining operation that's pretty far from your base could just sit there as blueprints until you force it with manual priority.. and even then it might just sit there and it's hard to figure out why.. so you gotta go around and shut stuff down to make sure..

-more about the economy.. the resources are limited.. so you could easily end up using all your resources just to repair buildings.. it's like playing StarCraft.. but when you run out of vespian gas and crystals your buildings set on fire!! mid game can be very broken, just scrambling for new resources so your whole economy doesn't collapse into an unwinnable state. There is no point where it's like "Mars is green now let's just look around and enjoy myself".. you'll beat the game seemingly with an economy that's destroyed if you even beat it at all

-i said the graphics are pretty.. but at the same time they totally aren't. Zoomed in everything is static, indistinct, bland and not worth looking at. You mostly stay zoomed out and form head-cannon stories over the vast map like its an icon based grand strategy.. which it basically is.. in fact I would say this game is the most glorified and fancy "connect the dots" simulator you'll ever see. Every building auto connects roads which are needed to get around but the roads are short so you usually end up building 6 power-plants just to get roads to the resource vein..

-combat is a joke.. If you are excited because it has combat don't be.. selecting and moving around your combat drones is just a frustrating mess.. and the enemy ignores your drones so you gotta go to where the enemy is going and cut them off to fight.. otherwise you'll just follow them around while they blow your whole base up. And basically the side with more drones wins.. so you could send a squad of 40 drones to intercept a squad of 80 drones and you'll lose all your drones but they'll lose none.. the enemy also pops up a couple times in the story but then disappears. there isn't that civ situation really where you are grinding against an enemy nation for hours and hours.. the fights can be quick and uneventful

-pause turns everything into a desaturated static.. which made me not want to pause the game.. and you'll have to click 20 times to change time speed because the icon in the UI isn't fully clickable..

-default audio mix Is a mess.. voices and SFX are way too loud.. SFX are basical a bunch of bleeps and bloops.. that's what the game sounds like.. music with a bunch of random bleeps and bloops that take you hours to figure out what they mean.. at least the voice acting is well done.. except for the commander and her daughter.. the asian guy (chang I believe) is played by yong yea who turns in yet another performance where he runs out of breath at the end of every sentence.. they were too melodramatic for me.. turned voices down to 50% and SFX to 35% and that sounded much better to me.

-The many popups can be quite intrusive, or even disastrous.. they pop up without warning and interrupt the game.. the autosave popup is forgivable but the research popups are like in civ where they'll stop your game.. and some of the popups like the cognitive test are without warning and last a good while.. and you can't close the cognitive test.. and the game runs in the background.. good luck if your base is in trouble and having a resource crisis.. you'll exit the cognitive test to an even bigger mess

-Multiple story threads are just dropped. no climax no ending they just conclude with little fanfare leaving you guessing if they will be picked up again, which they won't

Buy it on sale.. with the blue Mars dlc on sale.. don't let them ship this kind of slop. Could be a legendary game with endless replayability and clean easy to understand icons but it's just a mess.. a wonderful entertaining and addictive mess but a mess

this is probably one of my favorite city builders ever its fun and has a good story yes it has its issues mostly that its so time consuming to get resources from one place to another i have districts set up for different items like resources and housing but it gets so far out that all of my bots can get the resources from one place to the other in a normal time frame it took almost 6-7 months to get from one side to the other just to place down a single resource and the people who keep hating on this game just because of the semi janky mechanics probably shouldnt play city/world builders maybe go back to call of duty or fortnite something that doesnt take so much time to be fun overall 10/10 i would definitely like to see more in the genre like maybe a mercury or venus one or maybe further like the alpha centauri system

The game is a marathon and i like it like that. Most bad reviews are people that don't have what it takes to terraform mars. its not easy and nor should it be.