Surviving Mars: Below and Beyond Review (Draco Alivi)
Even if we discount the bugs (Which some have been fixed since launch, credit where credit is due; but some of them linger, like the game freezing when trying to move colonists between the underground and the surface), this is the prime example of an idea that should have never left the drawing board.
This DLC adds two new "areas": The underground, a sprawling web of tunnels and caves and the asteroids, very small maps geared toward resource extraction on a time limit. The main component is the underground, which requires a new resource (Exotic minerals) which can only be obtained in the asteroids; so there's the justification for asteroid mining. The Mars-sized elephant in the room is...why should people even bother to settle the underground to begin with?
1) Space is incredibly limited compared to the surface.
2) Logistics between underground and surface are a bother at best and an absolute drag at the worst.
3) Building pretty much anything requires a very hard to obtain resource which requires further planning and puts another bottleneck on any kind of growth.
4) Your colonists get penalties to morale and sanity while living underground which can only be partially negated through a relatively late game tech or a background that literally only helps with that (So you have to forgo better advantages).
5) You can only build the equivalent of medium-sized domes and below (Which are already a pain to set due to the space limitations), which means a soft cap on population, and a pretty low one at that.
6) You're further limited by not being able to build anything that relies on solar power or wind (Not only power generators, but things like farms as well)
The only purported advantage there is the resources are more abundant packed tighter compared to the surface (Which never was that much of an issue, unless you're playing with minimal resources) and that there are no risk of disasters like meteors, dust storms and the like, which would be fine if...uh...we didn't have a DLC that gives you late game projects to negate all these disasters with way less hassle already (Green Mars).
Also, there's the pretty significant issue that you're basically now playing three separate instances of the same game at once (Surface, Underground and 1-3 asteroids), which do not share the same resources and getting things from one to the other can be a bit clunky at best. Having to babysit 3-5 different maps is really a chore and turned a fun game into a drag.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to patch these issues around, since they are baked into the design. The only possible way it could be made into somewhat remotely enjoyable is including an additional mode with a specific "Mystery", in which the surface of Mars is going to be rendered uninhabitable for whatever reason in X amount of time, and the only alternative is to develop a new colony in the underground of Mars, with all the issues it entails; but as it stands, once I get the achievements, I'm toggling off Below and Beyond moving forward.