Surviving Mars

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 fa...

A red sun rises.

A city-builder with a killer streak.

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Surviving Mars, the latest and greatest from Haemimont Games and Paradox Interactive, is what I imagine Mars is like in real life: uninviting and brutal. There’s very little hand holding, and the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining what is going on a lot of the time. However, if you can get over the steep learning curve, Surviving Mars is an incredibly rewarding and compelling game.

If you can stick it out through an unforgiving and poorly explained learning phase, there’s a lot of excitement, challenge, and customization to enjoy beneath and beyond the grand, glass habitation domes of Surviving Mars. I wish I’d had more reasons to care about the people in my colony than just the balance sheets for synthetic polymers and microchips, but at the end of the Martian day, it’s like a SimCity sandbox where everyone can die at any time because you made a minor miscalculation in your electrical grid. And that’s actually pretty exciting.

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 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.

When the Earth fills up with people and discarded iPhones, what will we be forced to do? We’ll head to space: the final frontier. Specifically, Mars seems like a good bet. There’s a lot of nice, red ground, and presumably, resources kicking around there – how tough could it be to create a sustainable and prosperous colony there? That’s the goal of Surviving Mars, the newest building and management sim from the fine folks at Paradox Interactive. I’ve been playing it a whole lot, and it’s a challenging and rewarding builder that twists the genre in a promising direction but has definite sore spo...

As entrepreneurial wunderkind Elon Musk reaches out to settle humans on Earth’s little red brother, mankind wonders what awaits us on that alien soil. How will we come to terms with our new existence as off-world colonists? What trials will we face? Well, if it turns out like our first forays onto crimson soil, we’ll scrap the first dozen missions and kill off the first wave of settlers by accidental asphyxiation. Tropico developer Haemimont Games’ latest foray into city building is often as cold and unforgiving as space itself, but it’s also a tranquil and rewarding experience.

An enjoyable twist on the usual city building formula, that simulates the dangers of planetary colonisation impressively well – although it could have done with a slightly lighter touch.

The Tropico team plays it relatively straight on the red planet - but trouble is never far away.