Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars is another shiny diamond in the chest of Paradox Interactive: a multi-faceted, well designed city builder with a pretty unique approach and visuals. The gameplay is simple enough to get the attention of the player, but ultimately immersive and engaging.

Surviving Mars is a challenging yet engaging city builder that makes me want to colonize Mars again and again.

It’s also a lot smarter than it had to be. Usually with space strategy it often seems like a case of build it and they will come, especially with the current trend of Mars based colonization games. But Surviving Mars is by a long-shot the smartest I’ve played. It really makes you consider the cost of human life in its current state; to me it didn’t feel like a game blindly saying that colonization was the inevitable future of humanity.

Quotation forthcoming.

Surviving Mars manages to capture the poetry of K.S. Robinson's Red Mars, while also introducing new ideas and inspiration to the city building sim genre. There are some unpolished edges and missing menus but as a whole it is a relaxing and creative sim that has a lot of potential.

Surviving Mars shines with surprisingly deep gameplay and a complex economic system. Most of the time you are struggling to keep your fragile colony alive and provide your colonists with all they need. Always fighting for scarce ressources and against the harsh environment of the red planet.

Well crafted and challenging construction game, which gets more complex with increasing playing time, but also brings a few quirks with it.

Slow but hypnotically absorbing building strategy game. You will feel great while conquering the inhospitable planet, pity for designer’s mistake in not being able to connect the domes. [Issue#285]

Engaging and surprisingly emotional. Even though Surviving Mars can be frustrating at times, because of how poorly it communicates it’s mechanics, it’s still a great resource management game whose combination of a sincere theme and involving mechanics more games should study.

If you are intrigued by the colonization of other worlds, you should give Surviving Mars a try. It’s a really well-made civil strategy game.

Surviving Mars is a great sci-fi city-builder resembling Cities: Skylines. Its mechanics are many and the difficulty quite steep, but apart from some repetitive gameplay in the long run, it offers a great adventure and sense of accomplished for anyone who dares to venture to the red planet.

Surviving Mars, above else, is about hope. So many strategy games hold to their gameplay, eschewing any overarching themes or messages. But, as corny as it sounds, for those who believe in the majesty of spaceflight, for those who are keen to marvel at how pernicious our plucky little species can be, Surviving Mars is SimCity with soul.

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.

Surviving Mars is a lot of hard work, but managing a burgeoning colony never stops being compelling.

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.

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. Those small, potentially limiting gripes aside, Surviving Mars is a very enjoyable sim game that effectively mashes together individual sim micromanagement with larger macro concepts seen in games like RTSs.

My gripes aside, Surviving Mars might be the most fun I've had with a city-building game since SimCity 2000, and Haemimont has accomplished this feat by drilling down into the details, and zooming in on the kinds of small-scale community-building that I'd always felt the that city-builders with a grander scope lacked.

It is such a pity that Surviving Mars is infested by frustrating bugs, is at times unclear and has some resource balancing issues. Because, despite these problems, it is still a fun game, bursting with potential.

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.

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 fan of city builders, Haemimont Games’ latest is worth playing.

Surviving Mars is a pretty laid-back game with moments of chaos, that feels very nice when your colony is doing what it should. It is easy to learn, hard to master and those are the ones we love the most.

During the middle-game the process becomes blatantly boring: as your colony steadily grows, your biggest struggle will be with interface and lack of automation for certain tasks. After hours of going through the motions, you’ll wonder if moving to Mars was a good idea in the first place. [Issue#228, p.48]

The extraterrestrial city builder has a lot to offer, but suffers from design flaws, feels downright unfinished here or there and would have benefited from more depth.

The depth of systems overseeing gameplay is commendable. It’s a shame though that few players will find enough patience to endure poorly balanced pace and experience Surviving Mars’ biggest strength – its inventive endgame. [05/2018, p.82]

Surviving Mars is a sci-fi settlement builder which becomes more enjoyable once you have understood its complex mechanics. It portrays lots of sci-fi references and its controls on PC are pretty intuitive.

A solid colony builder packed with complex systems, but the red planet feels a little too familiar. [Apr 2018, p.81]

Surviving Mars is a challenging city building experience for those willing to work to crack the surface and is tremendously satisfying once you get there.

Surviving Mars is an unintuitive game that really needs some kind of tutorial. Still, it perfectly captures the atmosphere of exploring and colonizing the Red Planet.

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 is a very good city-builder game with a lot of upsides, but the early game is made unnecessarily hard by an absolute lack of tutorial, which forces the player to learn by trial and error.

No doubt about it: Surviving Mars is a good sci-fi city builder.

It’s an interesting experience, hindered by the lack of information the game provides about it. The ingredients are good, but it needs more seasoning.

Surviving Mars surely doesn't lack charm and depth. Dedicated gamers will be pleased to establish a massive colony. Others will probably look for a more structured and organized game.

Surviving Mars has the interplanetary foundations of a good strategy game, but it gets bogged down in its own complexity, micromanagement, and a surprisingly bland setting.

A great foundation, but sadly a giant misstep. [Issue#200, p.78]

Surviving Mars is treading old ground, despite the new soil. For better or worse, it offers a comfortable colony management experience that trades innovation for familiarity.