Surviving Mars review: The best simulation strategy game on Xbox

Surviving Mars from Haemimont Games is a true triumph, and represents a game I've been yearning for for years.

My hopes were high for this game, and the studio not merely smashed my expectations, I plant myself in awe at the dazzler and complexity they have managed to cram into this aggressively addictive simulation game.

Whether you're playing on Xbox I or PC, fans of urban center builders absolutely cannot afford to miss this game.

Surviving Mars, every bit you might wait, takes place on the eponymous red planet. Dust storms, meteor showers, and a harsh, oppressive landscape stands between you and complete colonization. Surviving Mars' engine is both beautiful and performant.

One of the issues with games of this type stem from organisation resource load as your colonies or cities get bigger and more complex. After dozens of hours of play, I was thoroughly impressed with how Surviving Mars ran on the Xbox One X and on my GTX 1060 Core i7 quad-core Surface Book two, fifty-fifty as my cities grew in complexity.

The Xbox One 10 in particular crushes Surviving Mars, running at a gorgeous 4K-native resolution at 30 frames per second. I was disappointed by the lack of advanced graphics settings on the Xbox One X version, however. I'd have preferred additional options for frame rate limiters and perchance resolution options to prioritize performance, as some slowdown tin can occur when your city gets bigger and bigger. That said, it's never prohibitively bad. And it's impressive, considering every bit more than and more colonists, robots, and drones that begin flooding your metropolis, things can get pretty crazy.

Surviving Mars, like Cities: Skylines, features some extreme levels of zoom, assuasive you to get up shut and personal with your colonists and city domes.

Surviving Mars tin produce some truly hit vistas.

You might think that Surviving Mars would have skimped on high-res assets for objects in the game's earth due to its top-down nature, simply this isn't the example. Most objects feature great textures which very smoothly scale dynamically as you zoom in and out. Equally a result, Surviving Mars can produce some truly striking vistas and intimiate up-close scenes for snapping screenshots with the game'south Photograph Manner.

Like many other Paradox Interactive-published titles, Surviving Mars features an in-game radio that has some surprisingly catchy tracks. A couple of the radio stations fifty-fifty characteristic K Theft Auto-style radio host parodies, which adds a nice impact of ﬂavor. I'd love to see the game expand the dialogue in these radio stations n future updates, especially the Ofﬁcial Mars Aqueduct, which features some dandy science trivia.

The game also sports some great lighting effects which track the time of day.

In beautiful contrast to the sun-blasted hellscape outside, the dome interiors can have hanging gardens, high-tech labs, and even casinos, some with multiple customizable skins. It'southward a pleasance watching your colonists scurry effectually their fragile oases, and thankfully you tin pause the menstruation of time to take in sights. Otherwise, you'd be far as well decorated to take a break. Surviving Mars can be a demanding game.

Gameplay Becoming Elon Musk

Surviving Mars has incredible gameplay that is equally addictive as it is challenging. The game emulates the anarchy and difficulty of setting up a new Martian colony by forcing you to micro-manage all sorts of gameplay features and systems, which tin can exist overwhelming at first. Thankfully, there are a handful of light tutorials on hand, and equally y'all progress further into the game and research new engineering science, the "Eureka!" moments commencement trickling through, making your colony evolve in exciting and interesting ways.

Surviving Mars has incredible gameplay that is as addictive as information technology is challenging.

The early days of infinite colonization are wholly dependent on Earth. Armed with a handful of drone worker robots and more specialized rovers, yous can build solar panels and current of air farms aid ability the early years of your colony. Later, you lot'll research more powerful engineering, like Fusion reactors. Of course, all of these facilities require materials for maintenance and repairs, Mars is a pretty hazardous identify afterward all. Until your colony is big enough to synthesise its own more advanced parts, y'all'll rely on cargo drops from Earth. Eventually, though, your colony will become advanced enough to be entirely self sufficient, with sci-fi farms, deep-mining operations, and all sorts of factories.

I started Surviving Mars over multiple times to larn all of its systems, and figure out the "flow" of the game. I suspect many other players volition too. Learning where to spend research points, where to prioritize your materials, and how to exist efficient with your limited options is crucial to success in Surviving Mars. As your colony grows in size and technological advancement, you'll be able to move away from micro-managing and towards total automation, setting upward flying drone supply routes, anti-falling star lazers, and huge "Wonder" projects to ensure your self-sufficiency on the red planet. But put, getting to grips with Surviving Mars is a true joy.

Simply put, getting to grips with Surviving Mars is a truthful joy.

The technology that powers your cities is based on real-globe theories about the colonization of Mars. While the game is anchored in realism, the game takes some liberties with its "Mystery" system, which drops unique storylines and mechanics in each game. You can disable them, of form. In fact, you lot tin can customize every attribute of your colony'due south nascence, choosing how much initial funding you want, special perks, and even the drib zone on the planet.

The Mysteries are interesting and add a bit of flavour, granting unique rewards for completing them. I aided an aging billionaire who sought to colonize other parts of the solar system, granting him access to my resource and research in commutation for unique technology. As a result of my efforts, I was granted a new crop type that was far more water efficient than the ones I had access to previously. However, even the well-nigh prosperous and avant-garde colonies can suffer from disasters.

Taking what you've learnt to build a more efficient colony is part of the fun.

In one of my earlier colonies, I merely didn't expand fast plenty, and concluded upwards haemorrhage dry out my funding before I had secured culling pools of resources. As I struggled on minimum life support, water and oxygen generation were low, I gradually extended my colony outwards towards a crucial metal deposit, disquisitional for repairing my solar energy farms. Unfortunately, Female parent Nature had other plans.

A huge dust tempest ripped through my main colony, destroying a field of solar panels in the process. My moisture farms shut downward every bit a upshot of the grit, leading to a h2o shortage, which led to crop failure, which led to dearth. With colonists literally dying, nobody was left to staff my Fusion power plant, resulting in a critical ability failure. The knock on effect of all these inter-dependent systems declining was palpable, and became a huge learning experience for my adjacent attempt. Of course, I could have just reloaded an earlier salve and tried something else, but taking what you've learnt to build a more efficient colony is role of the fun.

There are a few pain points I hope the programmer will rectify with feedback (and Haemimont has already pledged robust post-launch support). For instance, on both Xbox One and PC information technology can be quite hard to make precise selections at times, more and so with a controller. Also, colonist management on Xbox One especially is frustrating. Far too oft did I find colonists with specializations designed for buildings they were refusing to piece of work in, and manually selecting them to detect them a more efficient place of work was a job. Over all though, the control schemes on Xbox I certainly aren't bad, merely there'south definitely room for improvement.

It would also exist nice if you could ready behavioural policies too, for example, sometimes I just want my colonists to stop convenance for five minutes. I feel that on Mars, where supplies are always in short supply, colonists would be willing to use some contraception to ensure against overpopulation. It's also difficult to get an overview of your resources, particularly if yous simply desire to review the resource or flow of drones in a particular area. There'south oftentimes managerial guesswork involved as a consequence.

Some of these things will undoubtedly be improved upon in postal service-launch patches, simply the core gameplay is so damn good it's piece of cake to overlook the downsides.

Last Thoughts Must-purchase for city builder fans

Surviving Mars is an utterly incredible game that easily ascends into my personal top listing of best Xbox One games of all time. The affluence of emergent gameplay mechanics, the ability to build, create, and customize your personal colony, and indulge in all of those sci-fi fantasies of colonizing space has never been realized this well before.

The visuals are performant, well-baked, and majestic on Xbox One X and PC. Managing hazards, resource, and colonists feels dynamic and exciting, and the large amount of building types and decorations will keep creative urban center-builders obsessing over the details for hours and hours.

Pros:

Addictive, challenging, rewarding gameplay.
Slap-up visuals and performance.
Huge amount of buildings and customization.
Hours and hours of gameplay.

Cons:

UI and controls could be polished and improved.

If you're a fan of metropolis-edifice gameplay Surviving Mars is a must-buy title. Even if you adopt a more than creative experience y'all can tailor the difficulty to that end, or ramp upwards the scarcity for a truthful survival feel, where battling the elements most feels more like a existent-fourth dimension strategy. I go out this review excited to get dorsum to watching my swarms of drones scurrying effectually, and await forward to run across how Haemimont will evolve the experience in the coming months.

You lot tin grab Surviving Mars for $39.99 for Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4.

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This game was reviewed primarily on Xbox One 10 and tested on PC using copies provided by the publisher.

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