Surviving Mars is a 2X game. I say 2X because it is about half of a 4X game – it has the explore and expand parts down, but you’re just colonizing a dead planet, rather than competing with anyone else. The “risk” is that of a natural disaster of some sort or other striking your fledging Martian colony, but without anything really pushing back against you, it ends up feeling like you’re going through the motions.
The game tries to differentiate itself from other, similar games – as a game with real-time building and development going on, it tries to create some time pressures, and you have to lay out electrical lines and pipes to transport life-giving water and air, as well as use autonomous drones to explore the surface and build stuff. But in the end, it all ends up falling a bit flat.
You are in charge of overseeing the colonization of Mars. You aren’t an actual character, but the standard impersonal RTS commander. The game starts with you deploying a rocket to Mars full of the stuff you’re going to need to set up your colony. Rather than starting you off with people on the planet, instead you start off with a bunch of drones and some prefab structures to help set up your first colony. You must set up some water condensers, some oxygen refiners, set up some fuel manufacture (so you can send your reusable rocket back home), and eventually build a glass dome for you to build your colony inside, using metal you’ve scrounged from the surface and cement you’ve refined using an autonomous factory.
This is all pretty rote; while you get the chance to slowly learn how the game works, this part is pretty challenge-free, and is mostly just going through the motions.
Only once you’ve got that glass dome built – and some buildings inside that – is it wise for you to summon another rocket, this one full of people. Each of these rockets can contain up to 12 colonists. You get to pick from a list of colonists of various professions, with various perks and flaws – some might be religious and thus have higher morale and never commit suicide, while others might be gluttonous, eating twice as much food. Some of these perks and flaws are better than others, and as you don’t have fine control over who the volunteers are, you have to go over a list of a few hundred people to find the ones you actually want, using some filters to find ones with particular traits or professions you want.
This sets you into the next phase of the game, where you must keep these colonists alive for 10 sols (the game’s year-equivalent, though it treats each one as if it were a day). This is not really challenging if you’ve set yourself up properly, as all you really have to do is make sure people don’t starve to death and have something to do, like research technologies, grow food, or serve it to other people in the diner.
Once you manage to keep those 12 alive, you can start requesting more colonists from Earth.
Over the rest of the game, you research more advanced technologies, giving you access to new, better buildings, as well as various passive perks. Meanwhile, you work on expanding your base, building more domes, and eventually dealing with the offspring of colonists, working to train them up to be your next generation of colonists, while still bringing over more people from Earth.
Unfortunately, the game as a whole is kind of mediocre. If you aren’t paying attention, your stuff can break down, but once you build up a decent enough supply line, it basically becomes impossible to fail and you just gradually steamroll your way over the surface of Mars. The game has a ton of micromanagement to pay attention to, but it also feels like a lot of it is outside of your direct control, as the little builder drones you have zip around and do their thing without your direct input most of the time. It’s a bit annoying to watch them not build something you want them to build, or to let something accumulate somewhere until the building can’t produce any more until a drone comes by, but even that can be circumvented by building or importing more drones.
In the end, it all felt kind of tedious. Gradually building out your stuff without having any opposing force or faction is just kind of dull; it’s like a game of civilization where you never have to interact with any opponent and can just keep building up your cities and never react to anything. I encountered no serious setbacks, with the worst thing I faced being a broken water chip which cost me a bit of money to replace. While I intellectually appreciated that the game tried to be a bit simulationist in order to make it feel like you were colonizing a lifeless planet, it didn’t translate into fun gameplay.
All in all, Surviving Mars is mostly a game of surviving tedium. It just doesn’t ever excel in any way, and the game struggles to engage you more than passively.
1.0