Per Aspera

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.

This game is something I've wanted to play for ages. I'm so happy to finally get to terraform an alien planet like 12 year old me dreamed of after watching Star Trek and playing Traveller with my dad. Since I'm also a fan of resource management and basebuilding games, it basically scratched every nerdy itch on my body. I love it.

I tried this once, long ago and didn't care for it, but on my 2nd playthrough I got much farther and I found it very enjoyable. There are a number of story choices to make, and I suspect they shape the play (ps not happy where I wound up lol)

Really remarkable hidden gem here. It gets the entire factory game ecosystem genre down to a T. I wish they would keep working on it though, the community seems dead for the last 2 years. A 2nd game with improved graphics and zoom would sell well I think.

nice game - fairly addictive...

super

Recommended on sale.

At $30 this game isn't worth it. At $10 this game absolutely is. You'll probably only play through the story once, but I had a lot of fun with it. It was a fun, casual experience terraforming mars. The UI is pleasant to me. A genuine sort of fun. But I expect my strategy management games to have a lot of staying power, and this game does not.

Excellent, addictive game. I do wish some stuff was reworked, like worker AI (seeing that one worker ignore building the maintenance facility to move silicon 10x is infuriating) and some QOL features (ex, auto-scrap exhausted mines) but this game was a blast even without it.

Terrible game UI design, and unintuitive controls to get even past the starting parts of the tutorial. The straw that broke the camels back this time is the spaceport projects.

You dutifully follow along in the tutorial, get colonists which is part of a "special project" through the spaceport... but then that spaceport gets stuck on colonizing.... all the while the next "special project" is to find some silo you don't know where it is. Buy the time you do find where that "SA9" is... you've spent 25 min looking up terrible answers online to find out it's some small graphic quirk that only activates on a certain screen at a certain zoom rate (which is not anywhere easy to find and impossible to describe in text.) Oh it's a locked zone... by pure chance I see the graphic to unlock it floating almost invisible in 3D space. Then you discover you need a spaceport to start that... but oh... my space port is locked on colonizing. 20 min of more online searches (90% of the answers are terrible) you discover.... oh a dozen others having the same problem.... The developer just messages one back saying "huh, that's odd." It's probably here.... but guess what... you made a user experience so bad and so difficult to find anything that people online are just an echo chamber of the same problems, or people that got lucky on finding that graphic interface.... but they don't have the skills to answer or understand the question the rest of us have. It is on the developer to make some "HARD" "SOLID" buttons in the interface to help us control these things. A better understanding about the zones of the planet, and how that 3D interface is supposed to work is in order. My first three play throughs have basically soft locked due to something going on I had no idea was going on. No idea how to stop something from doing a project, how to unlock things before hitting a building cap (which was also never mentioned in any tutorial). As it currently is... it's a full game... but the user experience is just still trash with way to many unexplained core game mechanics leading us deeper and deeper into a time sink where we have to restart again and just wait for the next game mechanic that wasn't even discussed to sink another few hours into a frustating game. I bougth this on sale... and I still feel jipped..... fix the UI, fix the tool tips, fix the tutorail.... I don't want a story arc of an AI running constantly while I am struggling to understand how to get major game play concepts into my head.

Loved every minute of this large scale colony sim. Will be on the look out for future games. Story was satisfying and the dlc added nice content to play around with.

I've played multiple games about terraforming Mars, and this is the one in which the actual terraforming is the most fun, because it it stretches over most of the game and has some detail to it.

The main part of the game - organizing the transport of resources - is solid too.

All of this is held together by a mystery plot that I really liked, and that throws you some curveballs over the course of the game.

Recommended!

Per Aspera, Ad Taedium

:)

Found the game intuitive and easy to follow. Good game to enjoy at a slow pace and just chill.

love it

Worker AI needs serious work. Increasing the priority of buildings does not actually increase their priority to the AI. Coupling this with worker attrition means that you can soft lock yourself out of a playthrough.

Great game!

Loved the game. The only 2 issue's I have are the pacing of the story and the lack of better logistics options. Once you reach mid game eveything gets clogged even with hyperloops and max level roads. Other than that: great game. I would love another game like this set somewhere else with a different story.

The scale of this game, terraforming a full representation of Mars, is commendable and awe-inspiring. But the gameplay gets very tedious. I kept finding myself having to micromanage my collectors and factories because the AI is so wonky. By the time I started to get to the stage of seeing the first patches of vegetation on Mars, I was already burnt out.

I loved it
It tells a simple story in my perspective but simple doesn't mean it is bad. It has
some nice plot twists and I love how they thought of something different. AMI
is a nice AI and I love how we are "playing" her.

This game is alright, but it has too many rough edges for me to recommend it. The UI is very unclear, for example buildings don't work and it's hard to tell why. The buildings are also very hard to tell apart and it's difficult to get a good sense of what's going on in your base. There is also many ways to 'brick' your game, e.g. sometimes there isn't enough carbon or iron to produce steel, and expanding to get more steel also requires steel. Or there are random events that can destroy your base, and this may disable all the workers, thus making it impossible to fix. This ends up being pretty annoying when it happens after a few hours and it means you have to just start over, hoping that you don't get the bad luck again.

The game is a mess, it doesn't know what it wants to be so it does everything at the same time in the most worthless fashion.
The A.I is a mess, systems don't work, tutorial is not existing, the characters are boring, ui is confusing as fuk, voice acting is subpar, woke themes, only good stuff is the ending where you kill everyone as the rouge A.I.
Absolute horrible game, all the hours i spend where trash, even if i had got the game for free it would have been a waste of time.
Save your money, don't buy this trash and all the products made from the country of the dev team are of the same low quality cash grab.

Not much here

Enjoyed. Would recommend. Good res management game. Nice story construction based on choices. Do feel that you would have someone who was that emotionally charged pulled from the project.

Not Recommended: In the nature of a review that indicates a negative response to the game, the content within the game, or the narrative displayed by the game in either first, second, or third person.

In this case, I am responding negatively to my brief play here - in this immensely expensive and time consuming production - due to a minor choice made by development about how to present an artificial being, especially one concerned with the development of an off-Earth colony expected to suit the common Human being.

You promised me the ability to guide and curate such intelligence; you immediately made clear your intention to deny the most basic element of such curation, and so this solidly negative review - which would be scathing if I were poisoned in the same manner as your main character. I wish you better luck in the future; I wish us all better luck in the future. Also, for disclaimer, I am half-born of the high north myself... we must do better in our storytelling; the world advances without us lately.

yeah

plays kinda slow and i wish it didnt have the military part, but still satisfying

Great Mars sim. 10/10! More games like this will push humanity toward the stars. So much food for thought in this.

it's a great game, the story is complex and nuanced, the city building and management is balanced and enjoyable, and overall it makes for a very nice experience, as relaxed and not as you want it. Don't dis the story element, there are some real nice surprises there!

20+ Hours of chill terraforming with some cool RP moments.

Story spoilers will be in this review.

As much as I wanted to like this game due to the concept, I can't. While it's certainly decent when you first start, it only takes a few hours of gameplay for a myriad of minor annoyances to add up to the point where the game is nothing but poorly made.

First problem is there is a large amount of information that simply isn't given to the player. I noticed a building had an icon next it, yellow crosses in red lines. Still have no idea what it means, because there's no key or legend that tells you what the icons mean. When mines run dry you aren't told, the mine simply powers down automatically. Buildings tell you they produce 1 resource. 1 a day, a month? Who knows.
Next, the evolution of the gameplay elements feel poorly implemented. You get a meteor storm early in the game, and are told that until Mars builds an atmosphere, it will keep happening. I never saw another one. You eventually unlock a military tech tree to be able to fight off enemy incursions. After fighting off 2-3 waves, you can then attack their base. Wipe it out, and they're never seen again, rendering the entire military tree completely redundant.
The story has parts which are absurdly nonsensical. After the first enemy attack, mission control rings you up, gets confused when you mention the attack, says there's nothing on their investigations to indicate an attack actually happened, and then they ask you if you're sure it did. And you reply with "from what I can surmise, an attack seems the most likely scenario". I literally just watched enemy drones comes out of the fog of war and destroy my buildings, what the fuck are you talking about?
Another problem, and this is the biggest one. Citybuilders are based on either strategy (ie managing resources and population requirements) or aesthetics (making it look really nice). This game has neither of those. You can make a nice looking 'city, because you don't control the road placement, and there is SO MUCH ROAD PLACEMENT, and there's not really much strategy in the way of resource management. It's simply see a deposit, build a mine on it. Maybe there's some advanced strats that you can develop in the lategame after playing this for dozens of hours, but there's nothing to keep you playing until that point.

Great game. Basically Settlers + Terraforming Mars. Core mechanics are solid. There are plenty of cool megaprojects (space elevators, bringing down Deimos). Runs well, which is rare these days. Graphics aren't AAA quality but they are appropriate, and watching the planet change over time is beautiful. Story is well written, well executed and has some interesting branching paths.

Only complaint is that you definitely want Blue and Green Mars to get the full experience - but I'm not grudging the devs for collecting a paycheck.

4/10 A decent sim, but not quite enough cohesion to hold my interest long.

Really good game. I like space and stuff so this is really cool.

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I wanted to love it, I really did. But The production rate system is so infuriating that I just cant. Its an endless loop of problems due to poor optimization