When I went back to re-download and play Surviving The Aftermath, I also noticed that Surviving Mars was in my library. I guess I must've bought it a while back on sale and forgotten about it. Due to the similarities of the name, I mistakenly thought that these 2 games were developed by the same studio, so I downloaded both. I had also seen some headlines and social media posts about controversy regarding a "Re-Launched" version of Surviving Mars. I wasn't quite sure what was going on there, but I decided to give the original game a test run and see if the Re-Launched version would be something I might like to try. If Re-Launched fixed some of the complaints that I had with the original game, than maybe I would upgrade to that. Or at least, that's what naive me thought.
After playing for a day or 2, I was liking Surviving Mars, so I went to the Steam page to see how cheap the upgrade to Re-Launched is. That is when I realized what all the controversy is about.
Paradox, in it's infinitely consumer-unfriendly wisdom, decided to make Surviving Mars: Re-Launched into a completely new game; it is not an upgrade or update to the original game! Paradox is selling Re-Launched at full price, even if you already have the original game. Worse yet, Re-Launched is basically a "complete edition" of the game, with all the DLC expansions packaged in, and with a slight graphics update. The original game looks fine as is, so I don't think a graphics update was necessary. But they also de-listed the original game, and all of its DLC expansions, so that if you own the original game, you cannot buy any of the expansions!
Re-Launched is not an update to Surviving Mars; it is a separate, full-priced release on Steam.
This is a kick in the gut to anybody who bought the original version of the game. Especially if you never got around to buying the DLC, and are now completely locked out of being able to do so.
I'm sorry, but this is basically strike 3 for Paradox. I gave them plenty of chances to right their ship, but they have now completely capsized and have lost all of my good will. They bungled the premature release of Star Trek: Infinite and killed that game basically out of the gate. They then went on to do the same thing to Cities Skylines II, and then fired Colossal Order from its own series. And now there's these shenanigans with Surviving Mars. This is all on top of all the older controversy involving Paradox's greedy piecemeal DLC pricing, releasing updates to games that make old saves incompatible, and releasing games that felt generally incomplete.
I have had it with Paradox! I don't think I can buy another game from Paradox, and I am actually starting to feel guilty for playing the Paradox games that I already own. It's a shame too, because Paradox, as a publisher, sells games that are right up my alley. They specialize in strategy, management, and simulation games -- often with historic or sci-fi themes. Now I feel like I can't play any of these games, or else I'm giving money and support to a company that might very well be the sleaziest, greediest, and overall worst game publisher on the market right now. Possibly as bad or worse than the likes of Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K.
I don't know, maybe Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K are still far worse. I haven't been keeping up as much with news on those companies since I haven't been on social media as much, and since I actively avoid their games (other than buying used copies of EA's football games). On top of all that, Stephanie Sterling hasn't been making new Jimquisition episodes (now rebranded as "High-Steph") to tell me all about the evils of these companies and their executives. Well, except for a recent episode that reminded everyone of former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick's close association with convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein...
A small step before a giant leap
Despite my frustration with Paradox, I have been completely addicted to Surviving Mars since starting it up. I've been staying up till 2 in the morning on worknights, trying to squeeze in as much time as I possibly can to build my little Martian colonies.
Right off the bat, Surviving Mars starts to separate itself from other colony-building games. Whereas most other colony-builders (often with medieval or colonial themes) will start the player off with a small group of settlers building some logging camps and housing, Surviving Mars asks the player to select a location to drop your rocket full of robotic drones to build your colony's basics, long before a single settler even blasts off from Earth. The opening minutes or hours of the game are spent exploring the area around your landing site, creating automated resource extractors, and establishing some rudimentary logistics before you create your first habitation dome.
You must establish automated resource-collection before a single human colonist sets foot on Mars.
Then, when you have your concrete, water, and oxygen harvesters set up, and a healthy supply of metals collected from surface deposits, you can load up your passenger rocket and send your "founding" colonists to Mars. Again, in stark contrast to other colony-builders, you actually get to choose who these founding colonists are. Who you choose can actually make a huge difference.
Each colonist has one or more "perks" and/or "flaws" that give each colonist a set of interests and a little bit of a personality, as well as adding to the game's strategy. A "fit" or "rugged" colonist might be great in a fledgling colony because they are less susceptible to the effects of poor diet or uncomfortable conditions. "Workaholics" are great to have around when you need to push a resource harvester or factory to the limit to get materials made as quickly as possible. "Nerds" and "enthusiasts" will be happy and productive, as long as good science is getting done.
These various perks and flaws also affect the colonists' behavior. "Social" colonists will like to visit a bar, diner, or park to socialize with other colonists. "Gamers" want to have access to the latest entertainment, and are content to sit in their apartment during off hours and entertain themselves. "Hippies" like to visit green spaces. Failing to provide appropriate facilities for these colonists' interests will result in huge morale penalties, and could potentially result in them abandoning the colony for the next rocket back to Earth. In the worst cases, they might even going rogue and openly harming the colony in acts of rebellion, or they can become so depressed that they commit suicide.
Each colonist has a set of perks and flaws that affects how they will function in your colony.
The flaws can also change colonists' behavior or the productivity of the colony. "Gluttons" eat more food, which can be really bad if you don't have many food reserves. "Hypochondriacs" will panic if they can't easily access a medical facility. "Idiots" have a chance of outright breaking hardware in their home or workplace. "Loners" will be unhappy if the dome they live in is too crowded. And "alcoholics" and "gamblers" like to visit the bars and casinos (yes, you can build casinos on Mars), but have a chance of overdoing it.
There's more perks and flaws than what I've listed here, and there's a lot of different effects and combinations. You can even create a colony of religious fanatics! (And no, I'm not just talking about Elon Musk Stans.) You have to build a variety of infrastructure in your domes, depending on your unique collection of colonists and their interests. You can't just make the same prefab dome every time, unless you go out of your way to make sure you always select colonists with the same combinations of traits, if such colonists are even available.
These colonists are more than just points of population that does a job and produces goods. The combinations of perks and flaws make the behaviors of the colonists feel more dynamic. It influences how you build and organize your colony, and it influences who you choose to take to Mars on your rockets. They are in an interesting middle ground between the expressive characters of The Sims, and the faceless masses of SimCity. And you can watch most of their lives and activities, right down to being able to peer into their apartments windows and watch them sleep. Not that I ever do that... That would be weird...
You can zoom in to peer through colonist's home windows.
Un-sustainable colonies
The game is split between managing the interiors of your habitation zones, and building automated infrastructure outside the domes. You can also send rockets on "expeditions" to different parts of Mars. These expeditions will take a number of your colonists, drones, and/or rovers for a specific period of time, and will reward you with resources, new technologies, or the occasional buff to some existing infrastructure or ability.
In addition to the typical survival-colony-builder challenges, such as keeping your population fed and surviving the occasional disaster, you have to manage the life support of your domes. Colonists need water, oxygen, and heat to survive on Mars. The infrastructure that creates these life support systems must accommodate your population and be maintained so that it doesn't break down.
The planet itself can be harsh and unforgiving. Red Martian dust will cover anything left outside, requiring that infrastructure be constantly cleaned and repaired. Equipment is constantly breaking down! This is the primary source of challenge in the game, and it's also one of the most irritating things to deal with.
Equipment is constantly breaking down.
The game requires a lot of manual baby-sitting of your resources and logistics -- a lot more than is typically needed in these sorts of colony-builders. This isn't an oversight by the developers though; it actually seems to be an intended feature. The ability to automate your rovers is actually a technology that is unlocked deep within the tech tree, instead of something that you can do right from the start. In addition, the control hubs for automated drones have a limited range, and drones won't do work or collect resources that are outside of this range. But being able build more drone hubs is also a technology that is buried in the tech tree. In the meantime, you have to buy "prefab" hubs from Earth and ship them to Mars on a supply rocket.
The limited automation means that I have to manually instruct drones and rovers to move resources between domes or satellite colonies that are far away from my central resource-production centers. Rovers have the ability to be assigned to a trade route to help automate some of this, but they can only pick up one resource from one place, and drop that resource off at another place. You can't assign a rover to pick up, say, metals and cement from a remote mining station, send that back to your main colony, and then pick up polymers, machine parts, and electronic components to ship back to the mining station in order to maintain that infrastructure. I also can't assign limits to keep some stock of that resource as reserves at the origin point, so that they can be used for any maintenance needs at that location. If the rover has capacity to pick up all units of the resource, it will pick it all up.
Automating resource trade between disconnected infrastructure requires a lot of manual baby-sitting.
Even if everything were automated, the other problem with maintenance is that there simply never seems to be enough resources on the map to ever build a sustainable colony. I wonder if the motivation of the game's designers is to make colonizing Mars look as non-viable as possible. Since the startup costs of creating a new mining dome is so expensive, it just isn't really viable to keep expanding to get more materials. Instead, I have to rely on shipping resources from Earth. But this isn't practical because it's too expensive to do so.
Martian resources are depleted quickly.
The primary source of income in the game is exporting Rare Earth Metals back to Earth. There are other methods of earning money, but they usually amount to chump change. But these metals get depleted way too fast. I've often depleted the surface and underground metals long before I've unlocked the Deep Mining technology that allows me to mine deeper resources. And at that point, I don't have enough materials or money to build the domes necessary to actually work those deposits.
Maybe I'm just playing wrong and growing too slowly, but it just doesn't seem like creating a sustainable colony is ever possible. And I'm still playing on an "easy" difficulty on maps with lots of metal and concrete! I have no idea how the game's designers expect players to succeed on the "normal" or harder difficulties. Maybe there's some magic technologies at the bottom of the tech trees that solve these problems, but I never unlocked them. The fact that all the unlocked technologies are hidden and don't tell you what they do just means that you have to spend multiple "learning games" in which you probably fail miserably, just to discover what late-game technologies will become available. Or use a wiki.
Future technologies are hidden and unlocked semi-randomly.
Ready to launch?
The difficulty of managing logistics is compounded by U.I. nags and nitpicks.
For one thing, I can't queue certain construction projects. Buildings cannot be queued in domes that are under construction. Passages also cannot be placed until both domes are fully constructed, and bridges over passages cannot be placed until the passage is finished. This exacerbates the problems with the game having a lot of down time, because I have to wait for these prerequisite steps to finish before I can queue up the next part of the project, instead of being able to leave the game running and queue up more construction while the prerequisite steps are being built.
Even more odd is the fact that passages apparently cannot be built with junctions or intersections. If you have 3 domes in close proximity to one another, you can't just build a single "y"-shaped passage that connects all 3. Instead, you would need to build 3 different passages between all 3 of the domes, such that each dome has to now waste 2 building slots for the entrances to those passages. I don't mind that passages have to take up a hex slot within a dome. The dome entrances are airlocks to outside, so it doesn't make sense to build passages between airlocks. But why can't passages just connect to the exterior of a dome, instead of having to take up space within a dome?
Passages between domes take up space within the dome, cannot be placed until the domes are constructed,
and cannot be built with junctions or intersections to connect more than 2 domes.
Managing resources, particularly electricity and water, is also a lot more difficult than it needs to be. The production of these resources varies wildly based on time of day or the activity level of the buildings that produce or consume them. The game doesn't offer predictions for the ranges of how much resources are being produced; only the current amount.
The passenger and cargo rocket U.I.s are also very clunky and lacking in useful information. The Passenger rocket U.I. doesn't give any kind of breakdown of what specialties you have in your colony, or of what specialties you might need. Further, if you exit out of the Passenger rocket screen to check, and then re-open it, it won't save any of your changes.
Sorting and filtering the Passenger rocket U.I. is also a bit clunky. Opening the Filter screen will clear all your current selections, unless you locked them in place. The list of applicants only shows their name and specialization, but none of their traits, and you can't sort this list. In order to see an applicant's traits, you have to highlight over every single applicant to find one with the combination of traits you're looking for.
The game does not give an indication when a rocket is full of exports.
Then, when the rockets are on Mars, and you're waiting to send them back to Earth, the game will constantly nag you with flashing icons when a rocket is loaded with fuel, but it won't give an indication when that rocket is fully loaded with export minerals. I have to keep clicking on the rocket to check if it's full of exports before I launch it.
If only Re-Launched didn't feel like a scam...
Surviving Mars is a fantastic game! It has its rough edges, but it's a unique and interesting colony-builder that is surprisingly and consistently difficult. In fact, it's one of the few colony-builders or strategy games that I've played in which the game actually does get harder as it goes on. In addition to having to deal with dwindling resources, and constant equipment break-downs, the pool of applicants will keep getting worse and worse as well. As your smartest and hardest-working colonists die off, you'll be stuck replacing them with a workforce full of literal lazy idiots.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that senior colonists will retire from the workforce, but still live for many years, consuming resources and taking up living space in your domes. My partner even joked that I sounded like a Republican at one point, when I was ranting to her about these lazy retirees refusing to work while still consuming resources. I responded to her that "they went to Mars! You don't get to retire on Mars. If you wanted to retire, you should have stayed on Earth. The colony needs every available hand working the farms and mines." Yep. Republican, indeed.
At the time I was writing this review, I feel like I was just starting to get the hang of some more advanced strategies. I was starting to build dedicated retirement domes and tourist domes, so that those populations don't eat up space in my other production domes. I was learning how to use schools and universities to create Martianborn specialists, instead of relying on importing increasingly incompetent specialists from Earth. And I was learning how to place my Drone Hubs so that their workable ranges would overlap over storage hubs, so that resources would be better distributed across the colony.
But damn, these things take a long time, and a lot of trial-and-error to learn. And even once you know to do these things, it's still a challenge to actually put it all into practice.
As your workforce ages, you'll be stuck having to support retirees.
I would have loved to be able to play the Re-Launched version and the DLC. The monorail expansion looks especially useful. If only Paradox hadn't insisted that I buy the full game again and make me feel like I'm being scammed.
And hell, Re-Launched doesn't even appear to fix my biggest problems with Surviving Mars! So it's not even worth buying again, except possibly as an expansion bundle. If Re-Launched fixed these complaints, if it were a $5 or $10 upgrade for the original game, that left the original game and its DLC playable, then I probably wouldn't have a problem with Paradox selling the Re-Launched version. It would basically be a 2.0 upgrade of the base game.
If games like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk can completely re-invent themselves post-release without having to re-sell the game, then Paradox could've done the same with its properties. But they didn't. Hell, even Paradox's own internally-developed Stellaris released a "2.0" version that completely overhauled core gameplay, but did not require re-buying the game! And that was a way more substantive update than any change made in Surviving Mars: Re-Launched. Hello Games and CD Projekt Red chose to work hard to earn back the good faith of consumers. Paradox chose to be as scummy and greedy as they possibly could, all at the consumer's expense. It doesn't matter how good their games are, Paradox doesn't deserve my money, and they don't deserve yours!
I like this cute prompt asking the player if you would like to "Return To Earth" when you exit the game.