Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars is a city-building simulation game, but on Mars!

THE GOOD:

• It's visually stunning when it comes to the surface of Mars and the objects you're building on it. This is particularly true for the blast marks for space ships and meteor impacts. Amazing! This really helped put me in the mood of "I'm on Mars!"
• I really enjoyed the sound track.
• The tutorials do a decent job of showing you how to play the game without over-explaining.
• The early game is a really interesting mix of exploration, resource management, difficult choices, and the struggle for survival. You have to carefully balance producing resources locally, bringing in resources from Earth, becoming independent, and protecting yourself from potential disasters or accidents. You decide what to build and research. Really stressful and freaky natural disasters can happen that add a lot of tension. Each decision feels meaningful and impactful.
• Decent game design in the early game, where annoying chores can be automated and you move on to bigger and better things.

THE BAD:

• Surviving Mars transitions really poorly into the late game. The boredom started to set in for me once the colony became self-sufficient.
• Natural disasters that are a huge deal in the early game are just an annoying chore in the late game.
• The game transitions from the joy of exploration and the struggle for survival into the drudgery of manually moving colonists around between domes because they are too stupid to move themselves. You get warnings that your clinics are not functioning because no one is working in them and when you look around you find all your doctors working in random buildings. It's possible to automate some of this, by creating specialized industrial or farming domes for example, however, jobs that are needed in every dome, like doctors, can't be automated! You have to manually tell each doctor where to go and then impatiently wait a really long time for them to go. Sometimes, they decide they don't want to leave and you have to tell them three or four times.
• As your population increases, the micro-management problem only gets worse.

THE UGLY:

• Your colony, of say 500 people, is on a hostile planet. Everyone is living in domes. You desperately depend on each other for survival. Despite your best efforts, some colonists become permanently angry. If you don't set up a substantial security force perhaps they'll start blowing up buildings and stealing supplies. What would the normal reaction be to this? You throw them out of an airlock without a space suit. Obviously. If you're feeling humane you put them in prison. Why does the game have no option for capturing, killing, or reforming renegades? The only way to do this is to attract them to a particular dome and turn off the power, which seems really awkward to me.
• There's something called Mysteries, I don't know if there are different kinds of them, but the one I got was really dumb. It involved some kind of telepathic powers, dreams, and a previously populated Mars with trees! It's just ridiculous and somewhat hurts the premise of the game, which otherwise has a very hard science feel to it.