![]() How was I supposed to know that I needed a machine parts factory quickly? As I was learning the ropes I spent a lot of time sitting around confused about what to do next while I waited for a crucial advancement to become available in the semi-randomized tech tree or for my pool of prospective colonists back on Earth to refill. To be fair, Surviving Mars is mostly a sandbox game in which you’re free to run your colony as you see fit, but there are certain benchmarks you’re encouraged to hit, like maintaining a colony of at least 100 people. Getting all of these pieces to work together is no simple task, and you’re given relatively incomplete, almost bare-minimum advice on how to do so. Over time, they will gradually accumulate a thin layer of red dust that helps things feel more lived-in, and serves as a nice visual reminder of which structures haven’t had a maintenance check-up in a while. Everything from windmills to the little automated drones that run most of your infrastructure are done up in a Roddenberrian, clean, almost cute aesthetic that evokes a sense of optimism and comfort that’s almost comically dissonant with some of the disaster situations I found myself in. Your mission in Surviving Mars is to establish a permanent population of living, breathing, potentially insane humans on a sprawling, pleasingly rendered map based on real terrain data from our planetary neighbor. Life on the Red Planet is always perched on the razor’s edge, which gives an engrossing and only sometimes frustrating sense of danger and urgency to a genre that’s usually laid-back and relaxing. That left me without materials to repair malfunctioning power cables, which caused my oxygen generators to go offline, resulting in the suffocation deaths of dozens of people in my previously thriving and wondrous Martian colony. ![]() I stopped asking the question, “How can you make a survival city builder?” when my metal mine ran dry. ![]()
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