Surviving Mars Review (tboo technique)
It's a casual city builder for space nerds. IT'S THE ONLY FICTIONAL WORK THAT SHOWS PEOPLE BOUNCING IN LOW MARS GRAVITY! It's super cool to build up several outposts of domes and to build up a fleet of reusable rockets that go back and forth to Earth.
But for how harsh surviving Mars should be, Surviving Mars is pretty casual. If you know how to balance resource production and make distributed rainy day stockpiles, you'll weather every disaster effortlessly. That is the totally 100% intentional artistic message, right? "Robots make Mars easy." Resources are a little too abundant, except for maybe colonists. Their mental breakdown mechanic of "renegades" is trivial to deal with. The diplomacy isn't the deepest, and it was pretty easy to destroying all rival colonies, if I wanted. They shrank the solar system to fun-sized, so the rockets make the round trip quickly enough to bail you out, instead of arriving with vital supplies only when everybody's dead. The biggest challenge is making your playthrough challenging, and any challenge you do find only really lasts through the early game. You're not making decisions of real consequence. I've done a few runs with hardly any deaths and zero colony failures. And yet, I still recommend this game.
There are a lot of event chain campaigns. They're fun. Since most of us aren't doing a dozen playthroughs, I would look up which ones are coolest and do those.
The Terraforming DLC adds a satisfying endgame. Somehow, a bunch of machines in one tiny village is enough to green all of Mars -- do the devs know how huge a planet is? Don't think too hard about it! It takes long enough that it still feels like a grand project. You do more than make percentage numbers go up: you take a barren planet, build a zillion terraforming machines, add lakes, and sow seeds. You are rewarded by a lush landscape of grass and trees, and finally, opening up the domes to the now hospitable sky. The second time around, it feels kind of tedious, until you try to make it as fast as possible by massively scaling up your operation.
If you want a deep and brutal city builder, play Frostpunk, Rimworld, or They Are Billions. If you're set on space, Oxygen Not Included has depth and personality, and your decisions can kill everybody. If you want to live the specific fantasy of a thriving Mars colony? It's pretty fun. And, somehow, replayable.