Surviving Mars is a highly replayable, resource management sci-fi challenge
Survival games are all about giving ourselves a challenge; to master mechanics, make plans, and work out the best way to keep going. By Haemimont Games and published by Paradox Interactive, Surviving Mars challenges you to build and thrive and protect your people from the dangers of the red planet.
Set in the style of 1960’s/70’s sci-fi, you have the task of handling the colony’s resources and imports from the Earth while also trying to maintain life support, happiness, and a steady birth rate.
Story and concept
Surviving Mars doesn’t have a single set story or core plotline, merely a general setting it adheres. It mixes the player-led tale that emerges from gameplay and embedded story from the mystery chosen for that playthrough.
Your colonization mission sponsor can range from established nations to new organizations such as; Russia, Europe, or the ‘Church of the New Ark.’ They act as a base template for the game’s difficulty, offering different starting funds, base research points, special technology, and sometimes game rules.
Each mystery has a similar structure but combines a collection of new buildings or mechanics that are relevant to the plotline and govern how your colony builds and grows. Every mystery starts a fair bit into each game, giving you time to develop a decent settlement capable of sustaining some of its needs.
It usually introduces a new mechanic or building that should exploit and continue the story and then presents a threat of some kind that must be tackled and requires a lot of changes to your colony to survive. The mystery ends with a reward of sorts as well, helping shape your colony even after its completion.
My last playthrough was with the ‘artificial intelligence’ mystery, which I shall not spoil. It began while I was developing a small mining region to help combat my shortages. While my colony was handling itself well in most aspects, it was consuming electronic supplies very quickly, and importing them from Earth was very expensive.
Fortunately, an Earth-based company looking to test out a new AI for half a billion in funding and a free science-boosting building called the network node. I could hardly say no. Naturally, nothing is so easy; the mystery threw quite a few threats at me that destroyed vast areas of my colony. I was left to rebuild regions to be more resilient to the attacks and ultimately reconsider some of my original poorly optimized layouts.
By the time the event ended, my colony was leaning towards science; a part of the questline pushed me to build more of these network nodes, and the final reward offered cheaper technology costs.
My industrial sector had shut down, and all my money came from selling my technological patents back on Earth. Had I played a different mystery, my colony likely would have developed very differently.
All the stories revolve around one simple concept: how would we colonize mars with the superior technology we thought we’d have in the golden age of sci-fi?
What would we encounter, what threats might there be, and how would it shape society? Each story takes a different spin on this, but ultimately, they all answer that question in their way.
Some stories do so through a mysterious dream world, while others through a nuclear war on Earth or the invasion of some spooky cubes.
Graphics
As is typical for the genre, the game’s primary focus is on the mechanics – the maintenance of buildings and resources flow. However, it adopts a cartoony aesthetic like the plastic heavy, simple colors from the classic sci-fi stories of the ’60s and ’70s.
By infusing the golden age of sci-fi into its art, the game has a nice and clean feel while still retaining bright colors. The game also doesn’t push to be too serious; an art style like this helps you embrace the somewhat wacky comedy that comes with this retro take on sci-fi.
Some mysteries also introduce alien elements, all of which feel very similar to something you might see in a tv show from classic sci-fi – Mysterious geometric cubes or swirling liquid spheres.
There’s not a massive amount of pressure on animations. All the buildings have one or two to show they are functioning, and you can see the hustle and bustle of people walking around domes, but it mostly finishes there.
Animations serve as little bits of flavor when you zoom in and inspect a life support pipe or your hypochondriac colonists visiting the hospital for the 100th time today. They are never used to show game critical information through symbols and popups.
It would be a valid criticism to say the art in the game feels a bit simple or even rushed in places, but it’s easy to see that it aims to evoke a specific era’s aesthetics. It’s okay if you’re a fan of this style like me. However, if you value photorealism in a survival game, this probably isn’t the title for you.
Sound and atmosphere
Surviving Mars maintains its retro sci-fi aesthetic while also including contemporary influences in its audio, using synthetic instruments to create chilling and inspirational tracks.
It also helps create a more relaxed tone, combined with the visuals, and it does feel like you are building the idealistic space paradise envisioned in the ’60s, even when everything’s going so very wrong.
This sort of music helps you remain hopeful while still producing an atmosphere that reinforces just how barren the red planet is.
But that’s just the base music, and the game has a whole mixture of radio shows to tune in to, like City Skylines. Each station has its music style to suit whatever mood you’re in, and the presenters can be pretty entertaining at times through some decent writing and personality.
While audio isn’t an essential element of most of the game, outside of alerts and rings, it does fuse well with the visual elements to create an atmosphere of hope, wonder, and discovery.
Gameplay
Surviving Mar’s gameplay is primarily about resource control, starting with no people and only a handful of robotic drones and buildings. You have the task of spreading out, developing power networks, and securing necessary resources like water to generate more complex ones such as fuel.
Once you’ve secured fuel, you can launch your rockets back to Earth, export valuable metals if you wish, and import supplies from Earth.
Eventually, once your workforce is a little higher, you will need a dome to house people and the life support structures to keep them breathing. Quite a few resource extractors and nearly all science buildings rely on warm bodies to function.
Everyone also needs essential services and entertainment to remain content, which requires their staff. If comfortable enough, they might even have children or might turn renegade and sabotage operations if unhappy enough.
All these needs undergo challenges regularly through a mixture of random events and disasters that can make life very difficult on an unforgiving planet.
Maintaining resources and caring for your people form the game’s core loop. Once you get a little science, you can start unlocking new buildings and upgrades, helping to improve your infrastructure, which you continue to expand while you run into further issues that rely on recent advancements and so on.
There is still plenty to consider while building, of course. Natural geography can block development, and the availability of essential materials such as concrete can make one area seem very appealing.
Extractors are necessary for supplies, but they also generate dust that forces nearby structures to require more frequent repairs, draining more resources. Complicated buildings often need multiple resources as well or require expensive materials to fix.
Ultimately the push is for self-sufficiency. At first, you rely on Earth – then you rely on minerals shipped to Earth to fund the more challenging to come by goods. Eventually, you will be able to produce almost anything on mars with no help from Earth.
Even people become a secondary concern later; you can educate your own Martians into jobs previously only importable from Earth.
Replay value
As is typical for a city builder survival game, like Frostpunk, its replayability is almost endless. A vast selection of sponsors and mysteries grants many unique ways to play. Even a challenge mode offers 30 or so unique and challenging games, all with special rules and restrictions.
The game also has a lively modding community, offering even more ways to play past the game’s already vast amount of content. It’s also easy to overlook the significant DLC available to players.
Final thoughts on Surviving Mars
Surviving Mars is a strong example of a colony-builder survival game. It always maintains enough complexity to keep me interested while not being so convoluted I must micromanage everything.
If resource management and a quaint classic sci-fi aesthetic is your cup of tea, with a bit of survival of humanity sprinkled in, this is certainly a game worth picking up.
