Surviving Mars

 PC
User Score
7.0

Mixed or average reviews- based on 218 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 120 out of 218
  2. Mixed: 57 out of 218
  3. Negative: 41 out of 218

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  1. akarnokd
    Mar 23, 2018
    7
    I've enjoyed the game quite a bit. It has great replay value as you can select a "Mystery" per new game that provides some extra story, tasks, goals or research options.

    Pros: + Great graphics + Attention to many details + Fantastic soundtrack + Mars setting + Interesting story-like elements + Mod support, helping with a bunch of cons below Cons: - Difficult to micro-manage    I've enjoyed the game quite a bit. It has great replay value as you can select a "Mystery" per new game that provides some extra story, tasks, goals or research options.

    Pros:
    + Great graphics
    + Attention to many details
    + Fantastic soundtrack
    + Mars setting
    + Interesting story-like elements
    + Mod support, helping with a bunch of cons below

    Cons:
    - Difficult to micro-manage resources, colonists and drones
    - Vanilla: slow gameplay, even on [>>]
    - It appears the game runs on 60 FPS (smooth scrolling) but the moving drones start to "warp" after certain amount of objects in-game
    - Vanilla: storage capacities are too low
    - Vanilla: some products require factory operated by human    … Expand
  2. Jrdp
    Mar 16, 2018
    6
    When this game was announced i found several interesting themes on it, a surviving game, the mysteries, random tech tree, etc...

    With only 3 or 4 hours played it is soon to make a deep review, but my first thoughts: The base building seems a mixed bag, it's pretty and have enought options but the layout it's confusing, adyacent elements sometimes seems to not connect with energy and    When this game was announced i found several interesting themes on it, a surviving game, the mysteries, random tech tree, etc...

    With only 3 or 4 hours played it is soon to make a deep review, but my first thoughts:

    The base building seems a mixed bag, it's pretty and have enought options but the layout it's confusing, adyacent elements sometimes seems to not connect with energy and ask for 1 title power lines, it's dificult to say sometimes if the terrain would allow to plant anything at first sight, the domes are independent and people seems to avoid going from one place to another.

    The game seems to ask for a deep micromanagement but dont have the tools to allow you make it easily, it's very dificult and time consuming to for example review each colonist characteristics and set him in the correct dome/work but the game seems to ask for it, its like to be playing at Cities, have the need to organize the trafic layout but dont have any tool to see the densiity, flow, jams, etc...

    I choose one low dificulty (not the easier, but relatively close) and the game is too easy, the events till the moment are not problematic nor give any challenge and even one "catastrofic event" that was a massive meteor shower have almost zero impact on the buildings.

    The tech tree is ok, but i found the investigation too fast (at least on this dificulty) and dont makes you feel the need to have hard choices of what tech research, you could allways stack 4 investigations and have zero need to prioritize one over another, there is too strong favour to advance the investigations almost in order top-down left to right....

    Another issue is the depleting resources deposits, it's not a bad system by itself, but if in 4 hours i have depleted a concrete deposit and a water one and need to move to the next i have terrible fears that it would become an issue in mid to late game, needing to move whole base parts to another part of the map just to repeat the same that i made the first time but over a new deposit.
    If it would only happend over "strange" resources like rare minerals, it would be a okis feature, but when it happend with all the resources (water, concrete, etc..) i found ii not very desirable (It's the first thing i would seek to mod with the workshop).

    Another thing is the need of materials micromanagement on the mid-late game, as soon as the base grow you need to manually move the materials from one part to another as the drones have a limited radious, for example, repair parts that you are building on a factory need to be moved (manually) to cover all the base if the drones that need then are not in radious of where it's stored, and it happend to a lot of resources, on the short term it's not a problem but 4 hours into the game already started to be, it's the second thing that need to be modded, automatic routes.

    Visually is okish, but not great but is good enougth from a base building game.

    The UI is really terrible, lacks basic features, i still have to found how to monitor and extrapolate power, oxigen and water consumption graphs, visual layouts of wind generator output to place new ones, when crop fails i need to known why it does and why previous ones don't, etc...

    As previously noted the building choices are not bad and have several building types, but from the first hours i have the strange feeling that what it's short its not the building types but the choices whithin them, you one one building type of each, one point, and if you want a larger one, or another harder to withstand meteors, or another with less maintenance, or another more efficient or automated that need less manpower to functions you are out of luck. It's really a shame because the game is asking for it for example automated plants that need less manpower at the cost of a lot more energy and maintenance or a hundreds more options allow the player to build the base that they want, but it's not currently present on the game and it's missed a lot because that way the game is made just ask to define a bunch "perfect" layouts and just use them till the hell freeze.

    Ok, till now i have pointed all the negative, from my review you could ask why the hell with all the points being negative he gave the game a six? The short answer for it it's the potential of the game and that could be modded into a very fun and rewarding game.

    The long answer is that the game have a wonderfull basement that with DLC's and specially with user mods from the steam workshop could make it the definitive base building game (and from facts like that even mysteries could be added with mods lend me to belive that it's possible), it's like have a wonderfull terrain that allow you to bring into realliity the house of your dreams but the house it's currently a rusted caravan, the posibilitites are there but the reallity is a rusted caravan    … Expand
  3. Lewis12
    Mar 18, 2018
    5
    Surviving Mars doesn't live up to it's promises. It's pretty enjoyable until you build your first dome, that is for first 2 hours. Quickly becomes tedious and monotonous, with lack of any strategic or management depth (I've been digging management and city-building games for years). Overall, it clearly looks unfinished with a plenty of room left for add-later content.

    The game is rather    Surviving Mars doesn't live up to it's promises. It's pretty enjoyable until you build your first dome, that is for first 2 hours. Quickly becomes tedious and monotonous, with lack of any strategic or management depth (I've been digging management and city-building games for years). Overall, it clearly looks unfinished with a plenty of room left for add-later content.

    The game is rather unique for today's standards for not leading the player by the hand in discovering it's mechanics, which can explain some of clamor on Steam reviews. Nevertheless, it feels blatantly incomplete even on higher difficulty settings.    … Expand
  4. Hyperswede
    Mar 22, 2018
    6
    Bugs need to be fixed. AI needs to be fixed. Also it needs more engaging content and an end game. Otherwise it's very beautiful, fun and could easily advance to a score of 8-9 if what i mentioned above is delivered in a future patch.
  5. KevLooney
    May 12, 2021
    6
    Game sucks, it has very little depth and no drive to do anything. :P I did not enjoy the game.
  6. OverdriveA
    Nov 1, 2018
    5
    I would say that the game is fundamentally flawed because of the mechanic that does not allow the player to assign certain colonists to certain buildings. I thought that it actually worked quite well for one dome, or for a few domes connected together at the early stages when the system assigned colonists to buildings based on their best specialisation automatically. But if you built domesI would say that the game is fundamentally flawed because of the mechanic that does not allow the player to assign certain colonists to certain buildings. I thought that it actually worked quite well for one dome, or for a few domes connected together at the early stages when the system assigned colonists to buildings based on their best specialisation automatically. But if you built domes that are on the other side of the map, then everything broke down. For example, at some point the number of colonists rose so much, that the food delivery system that I had in place wasn't able to meet the demand. I figured I would just use the space in a dome that was built on the other side of the map, where resources were much more abundant, and build a new farms there. I had plenty of time before the amount of food that I had stockpiled run out. I had the shuttles built. To my surprise the system didn't relocate the colonists to a new dome, or didn't even assign botanists available in abundance at the first dome location, to work in the farms at the second location. Spare botanists were working at the factories instead. It goes even further, the system didn't assign ANY colonists to work at the second location farms for a long time, preferring to send them to factories and mines instead. When I tried to increase the priority in the farms, then the system reassigned engineers from factories, instead of moving botanists from the first location. The logic behind this setting is beyond me. It should be possible to assign certain people to certain jobs, or at least force the system to look for best application of the colonists skills first and move them if needed. Aside from this botched logic, the game has a high replayability and is interesting resource management simulator.… Expand
  7. Mattyc96
    Mar 18, 2022
    5
    The level of micro management needed is excessive. Colonists starving to death because they wont use a passage way. Endlessly transporting resources from one area to the next. It's not fun past a certain point. The foundation is here for a fun city builder, but the game wont get out of its own way to be enjoyable for me.
  8. Sepherim
    Jul 21, 2021
    7
    Surviving Mars probablemente, por sus mecánicas, sea un juego relativamente fácil para aquellos avezados gestores. Sin embargo, para los que no lo somos (es un género que siempre se me ha dado mal), tiene una serie de mecánicas que hacen que la colonia vaya creciendo progresivamente, de modo que es relativamente fácil mantener controlada la situación, saber lo que hace falta y avanzar. NoSurviving Mars probablemente, por sus mecánicas, sea un juego relativamente fácil para aquellos avezados gestores. Sin embargo, para los que no lo somos (es un género que siempre se me ha dado mal), tiene una serie de mecánicas que hacen que la colonia vaya creciendo progresivamente, de modo que es relativamente fácil mantener controlada la situación, saber lo que hace falta y avanzar. No tiene una campaña como tal (como sí tiene Tropico, por ejemplo), pero tiene una variedad de historias que puedes escoger en cada partida (una cada vez) que le dan ese rollo de trama, junto con el desarrollo de la colonia desde el primer dron hasta el final. Me hubiera gustado que hubiera una mayor variedad de edificios que construir en la colonia y más tecnologías, incluso con los DLCs se acaban haciendo un poco escasos. Pero en general el juego está guay, te enfrenta a las hostilidades de Marte pero sin resultar abrumador.

    Gráficamente el juego cumple, aunque no es ningún portento. La música es discreta, lo suficiente como para no llamar la atención y no aburrir, aunque no tan variada como podría ser. Y, al menos en mi experiencia, no me he encontrado con bugs (salvo que consideremos un bug la tendencia de la tierra a no ser plana aunque la aplanemos).

    Por todo ello, sin duda Surviving Mars probablemente no sea el mejor exponente de su género, pero si resulta un juego muy entretenido y con la suficiente progresividad como para no ser abrumador. Un 6,5.    … Expand
  9. Rekbond
    Jan 23, 2021
    6
    A pretty good city building game with a good "core gameplay". But the Insane micro-management that comes mid-late game (4+ hours into the game) ruins the experience of having fun playing "Surviving mars". NPCs just go from dome to dome with no plan at all and after a while, it just goes into a mess and there is almost nothing you can do unless you want to micro-manage for 20 hours.A pretty good city building game with a good "core gameplay". But the Insane micro-management that comes mid-late game (4+ hours into the game) ruins the experience of having fun playing "Surviving mars". NPCs just go from dome to dome with no plan at all and after a while, it just goes into a mess and there is almost nothing you can do unless you want to micro-manage for 20 hours. furthermore, in late-game all of your resources are gonna run out which is really annoying to deal with. plus the planet transformation, although it's a nice mechanic and fun at first, is taking way too long to complete and it's becoming kinda boring after a while.
    In conclusion, 6/10, buy after-sale.    … Expand
  10. Demiurge11
    Feb 25, 2021
    6
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Surviving Mars is a city-building simulation game, but on Mars!

    The Good:
    - It's visually stunning when it comes to the surface of Mars and the objects you're building on it. This is particularly true for the blast marks for space ships and meteor impacts. Amazing! This really helped put me in the mood of "I'm on Mars!"
    - I really enjoyed the sound track.
    - The tutorials do a decent job of showing you how to play the game without over-explaining.
    - The early game is a really interesting mix of exploration, resource management, difficult choices, and the struggle for survival. You have to carefully balance producing resources locally, bringing in resources from Earth, becoming independent, and protecting yourself from potential disasters or accidents. You decide what to build and research. Really stressful and freaky natural disasters can happen that add a lot of tension. Each decision feels meaningful and impactful.
    - Decent game design in the early game, where annoying chores can be automated and you move on to bigger and better things.

    The Bad:
    - Surviving Mars transitions really poorly into the late game. The boredom started to set in for me once the colony became self-sufficient. Natural disasters that are a huge deal in the early game are just an annoying chore in the late game. The game transitions from the joy of exploration and the struggle for survival into the drudgery of manually moving colonists around between domes because they are too stupid to move themselves. You get warnings that your clinics are not functioning because no one is working in them and when you look around you find all your doctors working in random buildings. It's possible to automate some of this, by creating specialized industrial or farming domes for example, however, jobs that are needed in every dome, like doctors, can't be automated! You have to manually tell each doctor where to go and then impatiently wait a really long time for them to go. Sometimes, they decide they don't want to leave and you have to tell them three or four times. As your population increases, the micro-management problem only gets worse.

    The Ugly:
    - your colony, of say 500 people, is on a hostile planet. Everyone is living in domes. You desperately depend on each other for survival. Despite your best efforts, some colonists become permanently angry. If you don't set up a substantial security force perhaps they'll start blowing up buildings and stealing supplies. What would the normal reaction be to this? You throw them out of an airlock without a space suit. Obviously. If you're feeling humane you put them in prison. Why does the game have no option for capturing, killing, or reforming renegades? The only way to do this is to attract them to a particular dome and turn off the power, which seems really awkward to me.

    MINOR SPOILER: I don't want to give any serious spoilers, but there's something called Mysteries, I don't know if there are different kinds of them, but the one I got was really dumb. It involved some kind of telepathic powers, dreams, and a previously populated Mars with trees! It's just ridiculous and somewhat hurts the premise of the game, which otherwise has a very hard science feel to it.    … Expand
  11. ErixKing
    May 12, 2022
    5
    El juego se ve bien y es entretenido, pero siento que siempre le falta algo

Awards & Rankings

67
#67 Most Discussed PC Game of 2018
52
#52 Most Shared PC Game of 2018

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
76

Generally favorable reviews - based on 39 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 23 out of 39
  2. Mixed: 16 out of 39
  3. Negative: 0 out of 39
  1. LEVEL (Czech Republic)
    Sep 13, 2018
    80
    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]
  2. Jeuxvideo.com
    Jun 23, 2018
    65
    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.
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  3. CD-Action
    Jun 5, 2018
    70
    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]
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