Surviving Mars is the latest game in my library. I swiped it up on Epic Launcher earlier ion October. It wasn’t a hard decision when I saw the sale, as it was a game I had looked at previously. The premise is sound, build a colony that survives on mars. I applaud the tutorial in the game, and even if you didn’t play the tutorial the hints happen during the all games until you decide to turn them off. I played it smart and played each tutorial that it offered, taking me about two hours of game play. I liked how it broke down the various modules, from movement, to giving commands, to building your first dome and accepting your founders.

Shortly after the tutorial, I went ahead and started playing my first game. Although I had the basics down I still learned a bit during the actual game play. I was trying to provide a lot of space, and even planed out a second dome, but alas I wasn’t too happy with the result. I felt like I could accept colonist quicker, I felt the space was too much, and I was constantly finding flaws in my original plan. I even had several of my second round of colonist quickly become earth sick, and I couldn’t replace them fast enough. So much like I do with most of my games I started over. I still have the saved game if I want to go back to it, but I wanted to start fresh.

The game recommends starting with a mission called Internal Mars Mission, but I was more daring and chose USA. Both times I choose to use the Hydro Engineer so I would start with water. Regardless I feel much better about this colony. I even started terraforming to use the waste rock that I had. Its ironic to flatten an area to store yet more waste rock, but I like them in the same area. I started having problems with my founders falling out of the workforce because they retired, but it feels more stable now and so far am only aware of maybe 3 or 4 colonist that became earth sick, partly due to retired people no longer providing service, thus lowering comfort.

The right side was my starting dome, the left side was my second dome, and of course the middle was the latest addition having completed the required research. The middle dome was a blessing in disguise, because I didn’t initially plan to have a dome in the middle, but between the size and then the ability to connect all the domes together with tunnels allowed me to use the same landing pad, and have everyone happy to move between them, comfort has risen, and my life support grids are now combined, and I have redundancy for that meteor strike, or a dust devil (tornado) to hit one of my power systems.

Much like any management game though, there will normally be an optimal way of doing things, but considering I do my best not to look up those idea methods, and prefer to let my creativity and experience pave the way, I expect this will be yet another game I can sink hours into, though I have already clocked 28 hours on it. My next step though will be to utilize the new shuttle system and expand to the right side after filling more of the medium dome.