Mars Alive

Around the time The Martian film came out, there was a free-to-play, text-only game that had a much more engaging and well-written story than Mars Alive. There are so many excellent examples of survival crafting games that simply substituting a nearly featureless desert for a forest or undersea world isn’t enough to hold our attention, and the absolutely glacial pace of exploring and crafting doesn’t help. The game’s trailers suggest a much more action-packed, epic and graphically complex product but the reality is entirely different. The biggest survival challenge in Mars Alive is its hours of repetitious and slow gameplay.