The game produced by Haemimont Games and distributed by Paradox a few years ago, so any look at it now is a look back since it appears there will be no more DLC content for the game. At its heart this is a form of city builder game taking place on an extra-terrestrial environment, and will have the expected mechanics of managing air and water as well as the standard resource gathering expected in this type of game. As a city builder it is at the low end of the scale, meaning individuals matter and choices on who gets to be a colonist or not is important, at least early on in the game. There are different modes to the game beyond standard game-play, like a Challenge mode and a Creative mode, so that specific challenges or just plain having fun sandboxing are available once the player is familiar with the game mechanics.
Surviving Mars depends on a game engine that works via a monthly pulse cycle for larger scale work (like maintenance) and more immediate pulses to keep track of the daily needs and supplies for the colony and the colonists. Colonists have health meters covering health, needs and desires, which tend to interact with each other. Social, shopping, gaming, gambling and other needs are a vital part of the game and those require buildings in domes that address those functions (groceries, bars, diners, clinics, etc.) that need to be staffed to fulfill those functions. Keeping the sanity meter of colonists in the green is a part of the background of colony management up to the mid-game where social and other technologies can begin to address these concerns so the player can address higher level concerns of the overall colony.
To get a colony up and running requires sources of energy (wind turbines or solar panels), water (either from evaporators or sub-surface melting and gathering of ice), a breathable atmosphere in the domes, food, and drone hubs with drones to do most of the exterior work. Concerns of the environment in the way of meteors, cold, dust storms, and some environmental features are part of game play and vary by location. Resources to gather vary by location, and those resources of metal, concrete, water and such will also vary by location. The colony is started on a grid map with a couple of sectors on the grid explored and the player can then prioritize further exploration or utilize deep probes (either provided or purchased) to get the basic scanning done. Once done a cycle of very deep probing starts to reveal harder to access resources. Drones can work with surface material, as can some automated equipment for concrete and water, but mining requires humans, so a colony will have to run on people with mines as part of the set-up. Supplies can be purchased on Earth and shipped to Mars, but that is not a fast system and can be slowed down as a game setting.
Starting a colony requires getting a sponsor, which sets the difficulty level of the overall experience from very easy to hard, and then choosing the leader focus (with many different singular perks available to help out the colony and expand on some later decisions). The first job is to choose the first landing site and get to work: there are usually some starter supplies and more can be included as part of the start game settings. The objective is to get a colony started utilizing those materials, constructing what is easy to construct and getting all the resources in place so that the colonists can start producing food, metals and attending to other needs upon arrival. That first arrival starts a timer of 10 sols (the largest time unit) but a live birth by a colonist removes it as this demonstrates the viability of the colony to your sponsors. From there it is a game of expansion and tending to the needs of the colony, as well as dealing with a storyline that the game will send your way at some point.
This is a game that the designers claimed to have studied what would be necessary to survive on Mars and build a colony, yet some of the resources and choices are problematical. Concrete, as an example, is something produced generically from a gathering device, which just scrapes the surface material, uses power from the grid and generates concrete and waste rock. On Earth concrete is made up of a calcite based cement material with sand, gravel and small stones added in to give physical stability and structure to the cement material that bind it together. Typically water is utilized in this and the resultant concrete needs to dry as it solidifies from the outside. Large scale structures, like the Hoover Dam, were made with a continuous pour of concrete over molds that were then raised as some of the outer parts of it set. In addition cooling pipes were put into that system prior to the pour so that the entire thing could undergo steady cooling as this is a chemical event that generates heat and can cause cracking on larger structures. Another form of something approaching concrete is demonstrated in Lunar tefra that has undergone a molecular bonding across small pieces of material of similar molecular composition and is a form of vacuum welding. Vacuum welding requires that close molecular type of the materials to allow for a true bonding between them that is, theoretically, seamless and is one of the most interesting types of welding available and is only practical in space with a hard vacuum. Mars offers neither a ready supply of water nor a hard vacuum, and the concrete plant does not use water.
I was trained as a geologist in college and Mars has some simple things lacking on its surface, like hydrated calcite deposits necessary to make cement to make concrete. There may be very small deposits of it, yes, and it is not a stretch of the imagination to say those could be available in a game setting. If so then where is the water coming from? The material in the deposit has to be processed, and that will remove some of the hydration from it to allow for the proper making of cement. That water is not enough to make much higher volumetric sizes of concrete: more water is needed.
That would have made an interesting dual purpose building that takes in surface material and then provides cement and a small amount of water, or takes in water to make concrete. Mars has the added bonus of having a lot of iron oxide on the surface, as that is what makes the planet the 'Red Planet'. Now that same building could be made into a smelter, and it would provide a small amount of oxygen, water, metal (the game is generic on this, and aluminum can be gotten from this, too though in smaller quantities, but it is generic so keep it that way), cement and crushed slag. In the other mode it would take in some water, provide oxygen, produce metals and concrete. Adding in cement would be adding another resource to track, however, and the devs wanted to keep it simple. The concept of an auto-smelter doing all this is not that far-fetched for real life and not that far out in game terms. Instead of having to mine for metal, it would be gathered from the surface material, and there is a lot of that and it is many feet deep deep. That would have made for interesting game play and feature an understanding of concrete as something that isn't pressure formed stone but an amalgam of materials with a cement. Getting the cement would be the problem, though most of the other materials would make up the vast majority of the mix, so volume of cement necessary is low in comparison.
That is really a different way of utilizing the same systems already employed in the game to create a different set of production systems. On surfaces that are rocky, a specialized crusher might be used in the single use system as it wouldn't be as easy to get yields of metal high enough to justify a full multipurpose smelter/cement/concrete system. An all-in-one system like that would require maintenance...and if there is anyplace Surviving Mars actually fails it is in the monthly pulse maintenance system.
Every month (and the actual named timeframe doesn't matter and it could be weeks or quarters or whatever...most games from Paradox publishing utilize a pulse system for updating the databases behind the game) a bit of maintenance on a maintenance bar gets filled and the material to repair it is indicated on the bar. Fine so far, right? What happens is no one, or none of the idle drones, get tasked with actually addressing incremental maintenance. The system is made so that maintenance is only done when something fails. Take a moment to digest that.
On a planet far from any supply lines, with limited resources for a colony, locally, there is no daily, weekly or even monthly maintenance performed on equipment. And the people need that equipment working to survive. For a few hours, a day perhaps, people might be willing to don environmental suits, but productivity will plummet and those suits only have a limited supply that will need to be refreshed from the overall systems of the colony. And everyone waits for something to fail before doing something about it. That is a non-starter and anything contrary to survival where you can't breathe the air outside and might freeze to death in a few minutes even if you could, is not the way any sane individual would run a colony. When survival necessary tasks are not performed then survival becomes a very precarious thing. There are mods attempting to address this and the general lack of understanding of how maintenance is actually done. Public and most private buildings that house more than a few people have maintenance staff to deal with janitorial duties, maintain the HVAC, make sure the toilets aren't plugged up, refresh the consumable stocks of thing across the building and generally do everything necessary to make the building a fit workplace. That is usually a daily activity. In Surviving Mars no one does that, and just wait for the drones to do the scut work, and they will only do it when something has gone off-line for maintenance and might take their damned sweet time in doing it. And if the materials necessary are pretty far away, then the inter-drone network might not be up to snuff for getting materials passed through the drones by the drone hubs, and you might go days, weeks or months without vital equipment being repaired due to lack of maintenance. This in a place where if something critical fails everyone could die.
While it is supposed to make for 'exciting' game play, there is no way to schedule preventive maintenance. Period. This is a system designed to cause crises on a frequent basis, and heaven help you if it is a critical drone hub that has gone off-line that is one used to service life necessary equipment. That is actually poor game design when trying to replicate how a colony with this sort of equipment would be run. This system can be used, use, and it requires a severe investment in over-lapping drone hub control areas, and creating a few more vital hubs with restricted areas for dealing with the sudden failures that are supplied by the surrounding hubs. Yet no one, in their right mind, would ever make a system like that for where survival is depending on automated drones to do repairs ONLY when something fails. That should be a very last resort, not the way things are run on a day to day basis. This system needs to be seriously revamped, overhauled and made into something that mirrors how things are done in the actual world. And if that means I would have to have a few more colonists with a specialized workshop dedicated to managing that, then that would be fine.
Truly that is a very bad part of the game, right there, and it is such a large part of the game that it might disqualify it from the 'city builder' genre as most in that genre do maintenance tasks as a background activity where it is addressed at all. Production of materials used for building and maintenance is done by colonists or shipped in from Earth at great expense. There are buildings for specialized products that are generic and made by people working in them: circuitry, machine parts, and polymers. Those things are made up using energy for the building, and then a consumable supply or set of supplies. Circuitry is made up of Rare Earth material dug out at specialized mines, Machine Parts are made from metal, and Polymers come from water and fuel (used on rockets and to power some systems). I'm fine with that, really. Yet these are also things that have been heavily automated in today's world, and base plastic feedstock for other work is done by automated systems: the days of someone hand tending to mixing and such are pretty far behind us. The same is true with machine parts, as CNC lathes and end mills have been around for decades, and at a hobbyist level since the late 1990's. And circuitry would require material for circuit boards, which are mass produced by machine, and fitted with semiconductors, also mass produced by machine, and then fitted on to circuit boards and for the less complex types those are also fitted by machines. People can do these things, yes, and for complex circuit boards that is almost a necessity. So where is the automated equipment for this?
On a game balance side it would be suitable for individuals with some skill in these areas to run machines to produce the consumables out of materials and be more efficient per hour than an automated system (using productivity and number of personnel as a game balance concept). What the machines have going for them is continuous, though slower, output. Too bad the idea was to ship people with lots of equipment to give them busy work when there are machines that could do that already. Having people do it and be more productive would be a fun game-balance system, where it might make sense to have a few people doing stuff by hand at the start, but to then start making automated equipment or shipping it in from Earth so that a lot of the background maintenance and low level construction materials are made by machines. Yes there is a mod for this and it is there for that very reason: the game, itself, makes no sense in this venue.
So that's two major strikes against the game for lacking realism of mirroring the real world and efficiently utilizing modern technology (not the 'out there' stuff of some SF) to ensure the safety and productivity of a colony far away on another planet (and it could be any planet that had a similar setting in a much higher SF category, say Stellaris). Getting the colony started should be and is hard to manage, and a lot of pre-planning needs to go in and then the player needs to execute on their plans and adjust as events happens. Artificial disasters that would have been stopped before they even started aren't necessary for this game, but as it focuses more on the management end of things rather than the actual technical end, it hands those out because of no one thinking of safety and maintenance as critically linked for survival. The focus of the game designers was on trying to achieve this survival via artifice, and not through overcoming obstacles and actual disasters of the types expected on Mars.
Visually it is a wonderful game, and laying out where everything should go and watching the drones get to work on it is a real treat, similar to watching an outpost station or any space structure being made in Stellaris. Individual colonists have a thumbnail psychiatric profile, meters to show how they are feeling about things and the entire personnel management concept is available for those who enjoy that sort of thing. The buildings and what they actually do needs an overhaul, and there are mods that add in buildings that would more naturally fit into the colony concept and attempt to add game balance via their own staffing, costs and maintenance mechanics. The base game ones aren't all that good but do the job of having the player focus on the sorts of people to be brought to a rather limited colony. As a bonus it is possible to actually zoom in on individuals and see what they are doing in most places, which is fun in a voyeuristic sort of way.
The stories should be more varied in such a game, or have many overlapping smaller decisions like in Crusader Kings II, which becomes a very personnel oriented system when it isn't a Grand Strategy RPG. Surviving Mars falls in-between so many existing Paradox published games that it is one that is easy to dismiss as it doesn't do any of the things it attempts to do very well. Would an actual colony and Mars be run anything like this? No. Anyone going there would know this is a one-way trip as even a few months without constant weight training will cause bone deminiralization and changes to heart strength. With only 40% the gravity of Earth, living on Mars has severe ramifications to any prospective colonists. Getting 'Earthsick' is done in the face of having to spend years of building up muscle strength, rebuilding lost bone material and getting the heart used to actually being under the strain of 1g. That individual may get 'Earthsick' and may not like Mars, but the process of going back would be severe, not to speak of the weakened immune system as is seen with people isolated running bases in Antarctica during the winter there. Psychiatric problems would be expected, yet the way to deal with them is to point out the utter reality of the willing decision made by that individual. Unless you land and immediately want back on the same rocket (which took weeks or months to go each way), there is little to no real prospect of return. Go as a colonist to Mars is a one-way trip unlike that of any other colonist in history.
That is not to say that the game is bad for not realizing this actual problem! There are infirmaries that the player can build on Mars, and they need to be open and staffed for all shifts to deal with a multi-shift environment. As the Martian day, or 'sol' is just a few minutes longer than an Earth day, the circadian rhythm adjustment to work cycles will not be severe. People used to working a day shift will suffer problems for working another shift, and that is something that should have been included in character profiles when choosing prospective colonists. That would be handy to get people who like working the evening or night shift, or are flexible enough to work any shift actually appear in the screening process. A simple additional trait check would allow for this to take place, with the assumption that if shift work isn't mentioned then the default is day shift only.
Colonist screening, back on Earth, is not very good at filling the pool of available people with those who can suffer a bit of hardship in their lives on an on-going basis. Yet a simple check would be to take anyone who is a prospective colonist out camping for a week, with minimal support and help to see how they fare in a controlled situation where a modicum of roughing it is required. This would help to weed out the prospect pool no end, and allow for traits that would hinder the prospective colony to show up early and be removed from the pool. Of the negative traits the ones of 'Idiot' and 'Glutton' would be easy to identify and the former could be politely told that they really aren't making the cut for various reasons. Space travel and colonies in space are very harsh environments in which true idiots may not accidentally kill themselves but tens or hundreds of others by doing something incredibly stupid. Space is an iron bar to such people, the Moon is a harsh mistress, and Mars is the nastiest task-master around. There are times when warm bodies are needed for a colony, but choosing someone who might get many, many people killed by being an idiot is something that a player should only consider as a last resort and that person put where they can do the least amount of harm. Why ANY sponsor would support idiots for a project they want to succeed is a very deep problem in the game mechanics for colonists. Not a strike against it as those people can be sorted out of your prospective pool by the search tools provided, but why they even show up in the first place is beyond me. Possibly for 'fun', of a masochistic sort? If so check that 'assorted forms of fun' box for the game!
The game offers good choices on difficulty and a few bits, like maintenance, can be turned off, though you don't get achievements when doing so. There are harsher choices available for the technology section (either a fully or mostly randomized research tree, instead of just lightly randomized), and ways to ask for more disasters or the entire planet suffering a severe cold spell for beyond the length of the game. A setting for one group of colonists only is available as well as not being able to get food from Earth. The game modes are various and the choice of what type of person will administer the colony will get differences in immediate small events that are generally short-term in nature. I do have personal preferences in both setting and administration and those choices will change the way you actually develop a colony.
The skewed maintenance and game mechanics are meant to be challenging, when the actual challenges would tend to be deeper and harder. Daily maintenance should be a real thing for the game, and breakdowns rare if the colonists are mentally stable and fit enough to do such jobs. These don't need to be high end jobs, mind you, but necessary ones for people who want to earn their way as a colonist. Maintenance and support functions are just that: necessary functions. Necessary functions should be well regarded and people doing them treated with respect as these are dirty jobs that, if they aren't done, have real and even lethal ramifications to them. Game mechanics for drone hub zones of control are good ones, so that large zones can be used for general control over wide areas, while smaller zones can help address problematic areas. Putting depots down to facilitate the movement of supplies across a colony is a subtle game mechanic, and even when air transport is available on Mars, the basics cannot be overlooked. Getting to a colony that mostly manages itself, internally, and only needs guidance for external and marginal expansion is a role the player will transition to over the course of game play. Moving from micromanagement to macromanagement gives the player a good 'feel' for what they've put down and can applied their knowledge to address any problems that crop up during a given run. That is a hard thing to do, going from day-to-day management to the long-term needs of a colony, and kudos for Surviving Mars for doing it well.
That is the strongest part of the game, moving from day-to-day or even hourly concerns at the very start to then managing a functioning colony as an overseer, of sorts.
There are features that are problematical, like the tunnels that only allow support functions (electricity, air, water) to pass through it, yet drones adhering to a static hub cannot transition zones of control via the tunnel. Nor is it possible to build an inter-dome connecting passageway through a tunnel. Really, if getting to different elevations for large drones that can take direct orders is possible then why not people in environmental suits? The investment in those pieces of architecture is large, and providing a human walkable surface should be part of that investment. It is a quibble, yes, and for game mechanics a player must show they understand the roles of the larger drones in colony development. Once a drone hub gets established on the other side of the tunnel connecting lowlands to uplands, then development in the new area can proceed.
Managing isolated colony sites with no easy connections back to the main colony is a real and necessary growing step for playing Surviving Mars, so that everything learned when developing the main site can then be applied to new ones: the player should be familiar enough with the game mechanics to get a modicum of success via expansion of the colony on the game map. Structurally that is well thought out, and even with the need to build tunnels, something like that would be necessary as the actual necessary resources tend to be at some distance from each other. Setting up a colony just for mining, or just for scientific purposes is a real thing in Surviving Mars, thus specialization in function for new colony sites is something the player must take into consideration.
To sum it up, the things that Surviving Mars does well is at the large scale end of things and providing a good set of growth mechanics that a player will have to master from the very start of the game. Expect the first few runs to fail for various reasons, especially lack of resources and running out of the starting budget. Shipping Rare Earth material to Earth on return rocket flights will garner need cash infusions, though it is to be remembered they are also need for colony maintenance. While there are some deep and extreme questionable decisions in colonist choice, they can be adjusted with search tools... mind you, home grown Idiots are your own problem for lack of a good school system. Yes, you need one of those, though the Nursery tends to be a generic place to dump off kids as there are no (as in none) game mechanics for families, all the way down to not having family names associated with an actual family (the names are generic from what I can see). Ditto the School which can be considered to be Primary and early Secondary education for unspecified general labor candidates. The Martian University and higher level research institute are also available with later game research.
The difficulties are artificial and ramped up in nature, and the sidereal day or 'sol' actually covers a time period closer to weeks or a month. Otherwise the hurdle of keeping a colony going for 10 sols would be the equivalent of 10 days, plus anyone having a child on Mars during that time would have conception take place on Earth...yet that is a major game event that can happen just a few sols into colony development. What the actual time span covered in game play is...that is a bit hard to pin down. Some of the artificial difficulties can be removed for non-achievement game play, like having a huge pool of colonists always available or having infinite money or resources. And if you are looking for a more relaxing form of the game, then those settings offer it.
Personally I was expecting to see a bit more of what has actually been mapped on Mars to show up in game play and where you start. Yet if you choose a custom start location, what appears is one of the few standard maps with resources scattered around it in a standard way for that region. That is questionable, given that the entire surface had been thoroughly mapped when the game was in design, and creating a 3D database to draw from and smooth out for game play should have been a real thing. That would have made it a bit more 'immersive' and allow for players to pick interesting areas with interesting terrain and surroundings and have that reflected in the game, itself. But that was just a personal expectation, only. If you don't like nitty-gritty resources grinds and city management games, then this will not be your cup of tea. And if you are expecting something like CK2 levels of personnel interactions, then you will want to shy away from this game, as well. As a city builder it starts at the very low end and works its way up to the very high end of city management, save that you are the one choosing sites, buildings and having to track resources, thus if you are expecting a more automated builder, then this is a warning flag that Surviving Mars isn't that sort of game.
Surviving Mars isn't a bad experience, by any stretch of the imagination. Past its major faults, quirks, and quibbles, the game runs smoothly and well for what it is. Yet it could have been so much more. At this point it would require a DLC that overhauls some of the basic mechanics, adds in new ones to address actual automated equipment and put in personnel as something to focus on beyond the generic level. Better and more diverse buildings, an actual maintenance system that makes sense, and perhaps a bit less of the sudden event style of emergencies and addressing some of the short and long term problems of colony growth would all be required to make the game more compelling. Review the mods available for it to see if the way things are going in the mod community can address concerns, and make a purchase decision knowing that it is a game with major flaws in it, yet is still an entertaining game. I put my personal threshold on the purchase decision at $15 and paid a bit more for the whole game with DLCs. Not a bad game for a total of $20, but the entire package feels like a complete game, and is a decent buy at that price point. I'm not a great fan of city builder games, yet Surviving Mars has the feel of a decent enough game in need of serious polish and some overhauling, even with the DLC content.
