Surviving Mars Review (Marovi)
TLDR; An amazing game to sit back and play for a couple hours at a time.
Of course as all games, there's positives and negatives, I always like to start of with the positives.
Positives;
+ The game is just straight up an amazing management game, it has early difficulties, mid game difficulties and when combined with the DLCs there's even late game difficulties. This makes for a very interesting play-trough, even if you've already finished the game once or twice.
+ There's quite a lot of start-off options that change your gamplay a bit, this adds to the replay-ability of the game (mostly in event changes).
Mix;
+- Due to the way the game is intended there's management in multiple levels, which can be tedious or fun. In my experience it turns out to be fun more of the time then tedious, but this is of course very player specific.
If you want to run the best possible colony you'll be encouraged to add filters to domes and manage your colonists on a dome specific level, which forces you to play a part of the game on the pause screen. You do need to be have the patience for that kind of gaming.
Of course you do also have the option to play a little more sloppy and spend less time on dome specific management, having tried this route myself as well I will say that this is very possible, it just extends your play time since you'll waste more resources during your playtime. However, this route is still enjoyable to play.
+- The DLC green planet ads a lot of gameplay mechanics and features that sometimes feel like should've been part of the base game.
Negatives;
- The biggest negative for this game seems to come down to an inactive development team, the game feels like the underdog of Paradox which it doesn't deserve in my opinion. The amount of time it takes to fix certain bugs is incredible in my opinion and that is if they ever fix them. I hope Paradox realises that the game can become much more and starts developing more features and fixes for the game again.
- A lot of the content is locked behind "Pay walls" (DLCs), this is very Paradox specific and was to be expected when they released this title.
To add a small list of the bugs that I encounter every now and then (These are just some of them):
- When naming your rockets there's a chance (haven't been able to pinpoint what causes this) that all your rockets get the same name.
- When building an underground elevator (newest DLC) you can click on the unfinished elevator and it will display a drone radius, this however also triggers all other drone hub radiuses to display but upon deselecting the elevator all other drone hubs will still display their active region.
P.S.
I'll update this review as I get further into the newly released DLC (Below and Beyond) since this adds a lot of potential to the game that I hope they reached.