Surviving Mars was provided by the developer.

My attempt at a colony, little crowded.

I always liked the thought of being apart of the people that first get to colonize Mars. Being apart of the first people to ever live off planet and start a ‘strange, new world.’ While in reality I couldn’t do that (nor probably have the luck of actually surviving the trip there,) but in the digital fantasy world I can not only go to Mars but I can start a whole ‘city’ there. Granted it’s not a city we’re use to with sidewalks and trees and such since there is not enough pressure on Mars for us go for a nighttime stroll (at least not without pressure suits) and nothing but carbon dioxide to sustain anything outside.

So what do we do with this real life information? WE SEND DIGITAL PEOPLE TO MARS! And hope to Ares (get it?) that you can keep them alive long enough for them to have kids and keep the Martian life style going.

Choose all your options here, harder increases your score.

With all that in mind, down to brass tacks. Starting off a new game, you get two choices here. “Easy Start” which has everything set up for you, no options, all ready to immediately start building a colony. The other option is “New Game” which lets you choose all the options you want. You can choose which Sponsor to use for your mission, from easy to hard. The easier side gives you lots of money to start and even more research points while the other end gives you barely any access to funding. You can choose your commander profile (you) which gives you pluses at the start such as a fuel planet produces more fuel or get instant access to a building you would have to research instead. You can choose the logo of you colony as well as which “mystery” happens while you there.
Next you get to choose what items and materials come with you on the first rocket as you will get only one instant ready rocket, the rest you will have to order from Earth which takes time, if you indeed have more rockets. You can buy them if need be.
Once you have that set up you get to choose your place to land which I personally like this little touch. You’d think reading that you’d get a handful of set places to land, and you’d be right but not in the way you’d think. There are set landing areas which are part of the named landmasses on Mars and you can choose to land there or you can choose any random spot you wish, including if you’re a true Mars loving person and know certain coordinates to land on, you can input those and land there with no restriction. Of course anywhere you land will have plus and minuses. Some places will have lots of water to extract from the ground and very little metal and concrete (which is more/less the base of which EVERYTHING is made from) or you’ll find a place with everything you need and more but the place get horrible meteor showers and/or cold spells (which freeze pipes) and you have to figure countermeasures for all this.

Skyscraper living quarters, little out of place but pretty at night.

But once you get one the surface, you get nothing but drones and remote rovers. Your robotic workforce will take supplies from the shuttle (once you’ve place storage places for them) and follow your commands making buildings and gathering supplies until you need to make a dome for your colonists. But don’t worry, they haven’t been sitting in the shuttle waiting for you to get that done, there are no colonists here at all to worry about. Once you’ve built enough of a functional colony, water, air, electricity, etc., and you’ve established a dome for the colonists, you get to request them take the journey to Mars.

All the details you need on each colonists, each building, each dome.

You get to pick all applicants from a pool of people who’ve applied. And you have to deal with the good and the bad. Turning on and off filters you like for people will help you get a colony going faster than just accepting anyone who’s applied. Going through the list you’ll find people who have experience with a job (Doctor, Geologist, Scientist, etc.) and people with no experience which you can train once their there. But all this people could have personal positives and negatives. An Officer could have the advantage of being a Survivor which means he can handle major negatives such as no food or oxygen for longer than someone who is but he could also be an Alcoholic (yes really) and the only way he can “relax” is to go to the bar and get drunk which then in turn means when he goes to work the next day he’s hungover and his performance is reduced until it’s gone.
All people have some kind of good or bad trait, with some having only good, or only bad or a mix of both and you have to make sure you can deal with that. If, for example, an alcoholic doesn’t get drunk because of no bar in the dome, they’ll gradually go down in sanity and finally snap which then leads to more problems.

All the building have details, elevators, lights, even sprinklers for the farm.

On to basic building. You get a number of building to start with, researching more allows you to build better houses for colonists or bigger domes or upgrades to current buildings such as better productivity. Anything you build requires resources and the starting basic buildings require easy to get items such as steel which you can scavenge from the surface or mine for. More buildings you unlock the more resources you need and not always those mentioned previously.
Drones run on batteries and will need to be recharged. Don’t worry they do that automatically but they’re not the smartest as they can run out before they get to a charging station. But don’t worry, its fellow brethren will come to it’s rescue and give it enough power from its own reserves to bring it back. They have a maximum range from its command station (either a Drone Hub or Drone Rover) but they can be transferred to other ‘drone commanders’ even if it’s outside the command range.

The research tree is MASSIVE. And don’t expect for it to be easy or figure out a way to instantly unlock everything. The tree is randomized on each start so you’ll never be able to quickly get that building you want going down one lane. But it being massive means lots to unlock and the more you unlock, everything gets a bit easier to handle. More power, more productivity, etc. works wonders down the line and you’ll need it especially when it comes to certain resources and using them for constant maintenance of EVERYTHING.

RESEARCH ALL THE THINGS! (There is another page to the right I couldn’t show)

The music is nice. Just like Cities Skylines, we get radio stations to switch between and there own DJ’s. The default soundtrack of the game, a ‘country’ type station which makes sense the original Wild West was untamed wilderness with people trying to survive out there and Mars is very much like that just on another planet. We get a ‘classic rock’ type station which has a lot of “Beach Boys” type music along with some tunes that just have a beat, and a ‘relaxation’ type station with just soft music. Ignoring the default and country station which have only instrumental music, the rest at times have original music with vocals and they are honestly not bad.

Lovely feel to the whole world, including free camera to look everywhere.

This is not a fast game by any means. At first I played at normal speed but it was just taking too long to do anything I needed. Which is not really a bad thing since it comes with a speed change and since this game is by default already quite challenging, sometimes you do need to slow down and figure things out, especially when some of the mysteries that occur you need to figure out what to do next.
One of my complaints though is my colonists don’t seem to be…smart. By that I mean I had a dome full of people, all trained in there specialties with places that need there specialty but all of them wanted to work at one building, regardless of there profession. And telling them to go work at something their good at they’d do but then after a day or so they’d go back to working at the one building. And since this whole thing isn’t about “making money,” yes they’re all doing this for free, I don’t understand why they keep working at one place when I need my botanists working at the farm. And restricting how many people working at one building just makes them go to other places I don’t want them at.

Zoom all the way in to your colonists.

Overall this is a good game, challenging but fun. Don’t expect massive “Cities Skylines” instant everything happening but you will get there, just give it time. I’m still enjoying it and figuring out my current mystery. No spoilers other than, I don’t seem to be alone on this planet…

One little thing I liked about the game, almost everything in the research tree has a quote from something to do with either science, space travel, or other related stuff. Eisenstein, Hawking, Spock, all related to what you’re researching. It’s a nice little touch when you think about the fact in real life, real people will be going to Mars with the plan to colonize it, will never see a blue sky, a beach, ocean, birds (unless they’re brought with them) again or anything we take for granted again. And having that scientific (or “scifi-entific”) quote to makes you think about all the people that want to do this and all the people who have encouraged it. It’s little sparkle that makes you think of the real thing.