Surviving Mars
A new developer took over in September 2021 and they have trashed the game with bugs; just the base game, I’m not even talking about the disastrous expansion (85% negative reviews!!). 2 months and 4 ‘hot’ fixes later and the game is still so broken that I would prefer a rollback over anything the new developers have done, if only such an option were available.
They have started working on ‘content packs’ now.
I was in the middle of a game, trying for some outstanding achievements when the mandatory updates applied. I would remove this negative review if I had a way to roll back to the previous version.
– Real player with 955.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Colony Sim Games.
Abstraction Games is ruining this game. It is my favorite game - even now. Yet, as time progresses, Abstraction keeps introducing more and more bugs into this game - at least for the Linux version. They also seem to just add more features that don’t really contribute to the overall experience.
If Steam would let me roll back to the pre-March 2021 release, I would.
– Real player with 296.3 hrs in game
Terraformers
• Explore the Red Planet
Send your leaders to mysterious locations and be the first to discover rich resource depots, giant crystal caves and stunning natural wonders.
• Develop your cities
Found new cities on craters and in lava Tubes. Make them thrive and meet your population’s rising demands.
• Manage your resources
Mine the rare metals of Mars, manufacture them into advanced goods and set up an effective transport system between your ever-growing cities.
• Terraform with ambitious projects
Restart a volcano, construct giant space mirrors or crash ice asteroids to geo-engineer the entire planet.
• Become a gardener of life
From spreading adaptive bacteria, to planting full-grown forests with bears. Each life form has specific requirements and provides strategic benefits.
• Join the Terraforming!
By making this game, we hope to inspire humankind to take its first steps out of the cradle and become an interplanetary species, starting with Mars! Do you want to join the terraforming movement, get updates about the game development, chat with us, and be the first to be considered for the closed alpha? Then join our Discord server !
Read More: Best City Builder Colony Sim Games.
Million on Mars: Space to Venture
Million on Mars feels great with its crafting and how hardcore it is.
The linking of the factories has to be my favorite part, it really lets you build complex structures and planning really has to go a long way.
The sound track is absolutely beautiful.
The terrain feels like I’m actually on mars
Obviously this game is in early access and a lot of work still needs to go into it.
Would love to see more progression systems but as early access goes I think it’s worth it!
– Real player with 184.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Early Access Games.
This is still clearly early alpha, but the resources/recipe system definitely shows promise for being a physically accurate model for really building a human civilization on Mars!
– Real player with 89.4 hrs in game
Per Aspera
It’s rare for a city builder / logistics game to have a good story, but this one sure does. Through monologue and dialogue options we follow the self-discovery and existential ruminations of the player character, an AI tasked with terraforming Mars. The planet visuals are beautiful. It’s incredible to zoom in and look at the contoured terrain and watch it change as it fills in with water and plant life.
Gameplay is less elaborate than most city builders and the logistics are not even close to the level of complexity of something like a Factorio style game. Managing the interconnected temperature and atmospheric composition is interesting. The end result is a casual, relaxing builder with a memorable story.
– Real player with 95.2 hrs in game
===SUMMARY===
This is my favorite game of 2021. I like simulation games as a group, and this is a beautiful installment of this growing genera. I love what simulations teach me, being spoon fed facts off a list. I love that (having played Per Aspera) I know the landscape of Mars better. I know some of the names, sure, but grokking the SCALE, the oddness, sparking my curiosity about Noctis Labyrinthus, just from working on the planet is priceless. I became familiar with Mars in a way that Surviving Mars never did (though I played that a lot too).
– Real player with 68.7 hrs in game
Terraformers: First Steps on Mars
Interesting theme, the graphics are simple but cool, the music is nice, it does run on GNU/Linux, but after eight hours of repetitive play, I wouldn’t call this a civ strategy kind of game, but more like a deck building card game, with lots of randomness, which gets you nowhere. You just need to be lucky to get the right cards at the right time for the right random spots to get a better score. No matter how good your planning is, there is too much luck involved. Maybe the 30 days span of a gameplay is too short for seeing the bigger picture, this is just a demo after all, but that’s my take on the current game. I do wish the devs good luck and I hope the final game offers a better experience.
– Real player with 8.8 hrs in game
A pretty solid board game
Game is very reminiscent of the popular board game Terraforming Mars, with some slight changes.
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Your starting hand is always the same 2 cards
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Beyond Oxygen, H2O and Temperature, there’s a nebulous “atmosphere” terraform setting
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Ever 10 years you select a leader, who has special abilities and traits that can be used on your turn
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Pop happiness is measured and scored.
Overall its fun for a few play throughs, but with the same 6 leaders, same starting hand, and hard 30 turn limit, you’ll only have fun for a bit.
– Real player with 4.1 hrs in game
Cargo Company
At present: very rough around the edges in the UI department, with a very tedious menu/window navigation scheme and hierarchy. Taking users through many pages of data that is both largely uninformative as well as redundant eventually requiring one to open window after window to reach the end of a menu thread which sometimes yields informative data or a shortcut to a specific object. Also featuring a very basic pathfinding logic regarding railroad placement which will very quickly bog down rail based transportation if not managed personally with signals and the “specific track placement tool.”
– Real player with 9.7 hrs in game
I’m quite new to this kind of game. Played some Open TTD before, which i enjoy a lot (free here on steam, check it out!)
This has a lot of the same concepts as Open TTD but expands on it in a smart way (settle on other planets like moon and you can have interplanetary supply chains that come with it).
Played for a couple of hours now and did not encounter any major problems. For an EA title this game is perfectly playable for me. I hope they will add some other methods of transportation in the future like ships and airplanes.
– Real player with 8.6 hrs in game
Moon Farming
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355970/Jungle_House/
Tired from the same farming games on Earth? Now, take on the role of a real modern farmer on the Moon! Explore new farming possibilities in a new Moon environment. Prepare land on Moon for your base and vertical farming inside of it. For sure, it will be farming like never Before!
Explore farming possibilities over acres of land on Moon! Start from scratch with prepare land on Moon for your base. Hop onto your Cybertruck with robots and speed up the tasks, but watch out or you’ll run out of gas!
And now it is time for vertical farming inside your base!
Start growing different types of crops and plant trees with vertical technologies. Do you need a lot of acres of land? Start using tiny space with vertical farming and see impressive results from such farming on Moon!
Ride your Cybertruck and robots tp explore the vast areas offered in huge open worlds on Moon
Moon Farm is the newest and most unique farming experience ever made!
Space Company Simulator
still has a lot of bugs, but they are working on it.
EDIT FEB 2020
They are working on it, but it doesn’t seem to be improving.
What annoys me is they bring out these occasional updates and put the game on sale to make it look like they are working on it and get more people in. But the updates don’t actually make the minimum requirement make it playable.
They even have the nerve to ask people to update their review of the game. So I am.
This is supposed to be a rocket management sim. The reality is you still can not launch rockets. At the moment all you can do is make more money than you know what to do with off interest from the money in your bank account (I guess in that way its not a bad Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos simulator). You can use this money pass time and move along the research tree but that is all pointless if your company is not able to launch a rocket into space!.
– Real player with 22.6 hrs in game
Author’s note: This review was written in early access and information (along with the recommendation) is subject to change… At least it better change!
Overview
The reader can infer that Space Company Simulator is a turn-based management simulation, so we’ll skip to the blunt description of the game: Space Company Simulator is like the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger: It was used too early in the year and turned into a disaster. (Okay, so maybe not quite as big of a disaster as the initial launch of Arcade Tycoon, and no lives were lost as the result of a bugtastic video game.) The player starts out with a big pile of cash, and unlike the sort of grind fests that are management simulations, Space Company Simulator lights a fire under the player’s butt to spend their way out of a spending deficit in order to run a profitable space program. (Hopefully before that big pile of cash burns up in the atmosphere like the player’s rockets.)
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
Reshaping Mars
you may see this and think “oh its a surviving mars clone”. but no, it has a realist view of how martian colonization would happen. the planet is a character. earth still plays a huge role. factions form, wars happen, catastrophes occur.
surviving mars is a clean, polite, and sterile future where you build a small portion of the planet.
reshaping mars gives you the whole planet. and you get to realize everything happening to humanity that you have set in motion.
– Real player with 111.3 hrs in game
Do i like the game? Yes i do. But if you experience just a number of those bugs i have i would not play it yet. Over half the ground unit models are invisible. ocasional glitching of my buildings and units so i can’t select them. visual bugs where your terraforming doesn’t show properly.
I think this game can be a really nice and chill terraforming game, but my game experience is extremely damaged due to bugs. I would wait since there is definitely some things that need to be fixed.
I will check the game at a later date and potentially change my recommendation since it’s truly only the massive amounts of bugs ruining it for me.
– Real player with 71.3 hrs in game
War Beasts
⚖️ Grade = B-. Worth a buy, if you enjoy sit and relax to watch the outcome. However, if you’re looking for busy management after complete setup, it isn’t play that way
EXPECTATION CHECKLIST:
✔️ Tower management
✔️ Variety of towers
✔️ Variety of units
✔️ Everything unlocked at the beginning
✔️ Build wave of attackers armies
❌ Campaign mode to learn about tower
❌ Passive Skills
❌ Urgent aids when needed
❌ Variety of location
❌ Fast Forward
| GRADE |
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
20210819:
Tried and it’s not bad. Though there is no guidance, you could figure out the way to play this game quite soon. But I do recommend the developer to add tower, skill and user interface introductions into this game, maybe a manual button in the setting menu.
Cannot sell or fix buff tower is kinda annoying and the money quickly becomes useless during the late game play even in second stage. Finding and clicking each resource tower to collect coins periodically does not give player a comfort experience, especially when you cannot move these separated towers. A collect-all button may be a good approach.
– Real player with 2.5 hrs in game