Reshaping Mars

Reshaping Mars
N/A
Metacritic
85
Steam
78.518
xDR
Our rating is calculated based on the reviews and popularity of the game.
Price
$9.99
Release date
30 March 2023
Developers
Publishers
Steam reviews score
Total
85 (717 votes)

「Reshaping Mars」is a colony simulation game on Mars, you will start by gathering resources, storing food, accepting immigrants, and building a better colony together. Develop powerful technologies for Mars Reshaping, make Mars great agai..sorry, just great. Don't forget to make the residents happy.

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Reshaping Mars system requirements

Minimum:

  • OS: Windows® 7 SP1 64 Bit
  • Processor: Intel® iCore™ i3-530 or AMD® FX-6350
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ GTX 460 or AMD® ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 (1GB VRAM), or AMD® Radeon™ RX Vega 11 or Intel® HD Graphics 4600
  • DirectX: Version 9.0c
  • Storage: 1 GB available space
  • Sound Card: Direct X 9.0c- compatible sound card
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ryhor.mudrahel
ryhor.mudrahel

Don't get me wrong.
It is a good game and as much I like playing it, as much I hate it's performance.
I didn't even start actual terraforming of the Mars, just occupied 3 regions, yet pfs pretty much close to unplayable, when it is barely mid game. I would like to play more and do more here, but I just can't. Very sad situation.

Slipvyne
Slipvyne

Good start, mid game is meh, the end is a slow drag. Basically need to idle the game for a while to see small percentage changes in your 'terraforming' score. The idea is to expand to multiple colonies/cities. But managing basic resources never ends. So while you do need to idle to get to basic terraforming, you are also checking every few minutes that your main colony has basics...water / stone / metal. I probably need to grow faster and diversify sooner but I wasn't engaged enough to do it again. IDK don't hate my time but don't think I'll be going back.

LFP Gaming
LFP Gaming

An absolute steal at $10

I'm 20hours in, and still discovering new technologies/buildings in the game. It really is a city-builder on an epic scale, because you've got an entire planet that you can build on (literally). Unfortunately the lag becomes an annoyance in the late game when you have multiple cities, but it's still playable, and even 20hours in, I just want to keep on going to expand my base even further across the planet. Can't say anything bad about the game, except for the lag that could be optimized.

Felix
Felix

Lost potential.

Played both old and new versions of the game.
New one actually convinced me to buy it, as i liked the premise of it. Early game is nice, gradual increase in complexity adding new mechanics, production chains etc. The more you got into however, the more grindy it became. In the late game i just let it play as i was afking for hours to get to terraform the planet. There is literally nothing to do, enemies that you only care about if you expand greatly (you don't have to as you can mine everything from starting tile), boring as hell.

Then i got into playing the old version. And i sunk into it. Story, random event chains, diplomacy, enemies so you've had to actually build up your military. I was engaged in it. Passed through wars with Earth Corporations, robots uprising, traitors from within, seeing Earth crumble under itself. Finally got to terraforming Mars, as in the newer version you have bots that let you terraform ground, then make it organic, sprinkle some trees etc. Then you finally see the problems. Horrible pathfinding, automatic terraforming/surveying that doesn't work because bots get stuck everywhere, can't choose their destination so they just wander around doing nothing until you actually move them. Events? Gone. Diplomacy? Earth is dead by the time i got to terraform so no one to talk to. Enemies? Bugs start to show up in random places and you can either exterminate them or coexist. DO NOT KILL THEM. They're gonna show up from time to time whenever there's organic soil, kill a bunch of buildings until you move your military to kill them. So you just wait for stupid bots to move slowly, build trees even slower to finally finish the game. It didn't even allow me to go AFK as I had to watch out for bugs and place new trees, which at least i didn't have to do in a new one.

Could be good, pity that it really isn't

Orthum
Orthum

This game has a few rough edges, but has a solid structure.
You build a bit, research, redesign, and now you have a much larger base that can take massive amounts of resources.
It could use a bit more polish, but I find myself enjoying watching my base grow. I think for the price, what it offers is a great experience. Hopefully the developer will have some success and add more or clean it up more.
That being said, I enjoy it and think it has great potential to be a game I enjoy playing for a long while.

jasonbardon
jasonbardon

I like it but it has its balance issues, many solved by mods, and sometimes it crashes on my computer, requires many hours to get any progress on teraforming. The developer has also abandoned it so while i enjoy it and would probably buy again just know what you're buying.

Davetiger
Davetiger

Although the dev seems to have abandoned the game it's still a very well done sim city meets factorio style game.
The people management is enough to drive you mad. There are some pretty nasty bugs that since the dev game up on the game I can only assume means it's never going to be fixed but still for $10 the game is worth more than some of the other games I've paid $30 or even $50 for.
One major bug you will find that alloy just won't produce something about water in the building won't stay full, best I can tell the "production que only ticks every 3 or 4 sec and it holds 6 water in that building but the building uses 8 to 10 every 4 sec so it constantly has to wait for it even though it's piped in.
Another bug is when things are being delivered they get sent in 1 item type meaning if you say have 3 items going to another planet and they are set to infinite but only have 1 transport, the transport even though it has a 6k capicity, and you have 200 of 1 and 200 of another the transport will only take 200 of 1, return and take 6 of that same one even though that other 200 is now 1000,
This can be a headache trying to automate other regions for delivery of ores but other than this I haven't ran into anything that really prevents play, if the mods were in english they may have fixed some of these issues but from what I've read on forums using mods the game stops saving so might not be the best choice. I wouldn't recommend it because of the major bugs that will never be addressed (saving being a major one) but if they ever fixed these minor issues I'd say it would be well worth it, but for $10 you might say it's worth it now at the time of this writing I got 60 hours out of it and not ready to stop just yet
I really want to give it a thumbs up but when the dev abandoned it, should I really recommend you give him more money?

Darkchaos
Darkchaos

It pains me to do this, but I can't recommend this game anymore. The dev has released an update which completely overhauled the game, and there have been a lot of changes made I don't believe were for the better.

First of all, the game has undergone a complete genre shift. In the old version, it was a 4X RTS basebuilding game on Mars. The core gameplay loop was simple yet compelling: expansion.

You would slowly explore Mars, discover resources and build structures to exploit deposits, and set up Martian cities. An additional layer of complexity was added to this with building synergies. For example, a farm would be more productive if set up next to a water extractor. Simple, but effective and thought-provoking. This also meant that you never had a reason to idle in the game, there was always more to be done, more to build. It didn't feel repetitive either, as you could just queue up a lot of orders for your units and they would handle it.

Now the game has been overhauled into more of a production chain management combined with a basebuilding game. Before, you had global resource pools which ticked every cycle. Now you have physical resources in the world which need to be transported.

On top of that, there's a whole lot more resources now. Before, you had overarching resource types like food, water, minerals, consumer goods, so on. Now each type has been broken up into several individual goods which your people will demand. So instead of food, you have beans, soybeans, peanuts and so on with different production chains.

But despite now being a production chain-focused game, the game offers you very little tools to actually manage production. You have to select individual production facilities, and you can queue up production batches, or have them produce something infinitely.

You don't have something as simple as setting up limited production orders, along the lines of "Produce until there's 200 of X in stock". There's also no way to centrally control your production facilities, and no statistics or charts to see production and consumption. Facilities also don't clearly tell you how many products they produce in a given period of time.

I was still in the earlygame and it was becoming confusing and difficult to manage production due to the lack of proper tools to do so, and the tech tree only showed increasing amounts of products over time which makes the entire situation worse, on top of compounding with other problems which I'll get to.

Two other problems are resource depletion, and the inability to make new worker units until a fair amount into the tech tree and you've established a lot of industry.

The previous version used a system of resource deposits that generally didn't get depleted, ever. This was good, as it allowed you to focus on expanding your Martian civilization rather than worrying about running out of resources and collapsing. It also prevents the player from needing to micromanage resource extraction.

In the new version, terrain can be deformed which I would consider a good change, but all resource extraction has been replaced with mining out terrain containing resource deposits. This has to be ordered manually which is a cause of micromanagement, and this makes resources non-renewable.

Why is this a problem? Well, consider that you're building an entire civilization on mars and you need to provide your colonists with various goods. Even water which is used for agriculture is a finite resource as you need to mine it from ice deposits.

As you gain more people, you need to use up more resources to supply them, which means more mining, more micromanagement and less resources in the world. While it's likely that Mars has more resources than you could possibly need, the process of getting those resources will get increasingly painful as time goes on.

This system in of itself is worse than the last but I will admit that it's possible that it could be fixed with sufficient automation features, or the introduction of alternative sources of resources that don't rely on mining resource deposits.

Although setting up automated mining would be a massive development challenge, as the mining is done by excavating the "blocks" making up the world. There's a lot of problems that could happen there, like the AI deforming the terrain near your base and ruining your construction plans.

There's also one other major issue which compounds all these economical issues. Your basic worker unit is the engineering vehicle, and it's used for everything from mining to hauling items between locations, but you only get three of them at the start and you can't make more until much later in the game.

It cannot be understated how much of a problem this is. You are encouraged to only build the bare minimum you need until you gain the ability to build more engineering vehicles. If you expand too much, your engineering vehicles will be overloaded with tasks needing completion and your economy will start crumbling.

At the date of this review, you research engineering vehicle production at about the halfway point in the tech tree, which require advanced products from multiple industries. Which is something made worse by the lack of proper production management mentioned previously.

Until you get the ability to make engineering vehicles, the gameplay loop is essentially waiting for research to be done, adding a few buildings to your base and maybe designating more mining. Which is a complete contrast to the previous version's continual expansion and planning of your Martian civilization.

There's also been a few other changes, some of which I liked, some of which I did not. I'll go through them for completeness' sake.

The game world has been expanded, now Mars is the same size as in real life. However, the new system restricts you to looking at individual regions of Mars instead of seeing and operating on a single map encompassing the entire planet. I like the scale, but not the region system. I can understand that it may be too much to ask for to be able to see and operate on the new world map at once however.

The terraforming system has been greatly expanded and now you can work on various metrics according to your own plan, instead of having to follow a preset plan like in the previous version. I like this a lot, I don't have anything negative to say here.

The human colonists have been changed from an abstract data model to a simulated agent system. Meaning, each individual colonist now exists in the world, needs to meet their needs, travel between home and work and so on. I don't like this because this system doesn't actually seem to add to the game beyond increasing computational load.

The cities in the previous version worked much like the cities in Civilization. You built a city center, added houses and service buildings, and you could employ the colonists in nearby workplaces. The colonists were abstract, but they were simulated with different values for morale and health. This was a very good system and allowed for higher population sizes, as it's easier to work with abstract data than simulate individuals.

In the new system, colonists exist in the world, have homes they rest in, visit markets to get food and goods, go to work and visit service buildings. Which is different from the old system how exactly? I don't see how it's better. Seems pointless and like it only drains computer resources.

The final change is the complete removal of random and story events. I can understand removing random events, as having to deal with endless popups could be annoying, but this wasn't as much of a problem in the previous version as an option was added to set an automatic response for events and you can just handle them that way.

I'm near the word limit so I'll finish here. More will be in the comments. The previous version of the game was much better than the current one, and I wouldn't recommend buying the game in its current state.

x1xcerberusx1x
x1xcerberusx1x

Played enough to start greening the planet before the rework and i started a new game with the rework and its pretty good. Research seems to take longer than id like it to but its still pretty good. Logistics is a little funky at times like why are my engineers taking resources from a storage building all the way over to the area im mining to add the mined resources to the stack just to put the stack back in the storage building but hey at least they are not dropping any along the way XD, needs more/different music and or sound effects but still a pretty solid game at this point
Keep up the great work

uyeasound
uyeasound

I understand this game is early access, and I was willing to overlook its rougher aspects until it crashed less than 6 steps into the tutorial. I found myself staring at its page in my Steam library and not wanting to start it up again. At least half of my time playing was spent waiting on loading screens, even though I met the game specs and was running it from SSD storage.

My main turnoff was a general lack of care and polish with text and tutorials. The in-game text has an unfinished feeling with poor punctuation, and could really benefit from being looked over by a native speaker with a good grasp of grammar and style. Sometimes the tutorial would skip to the next step immediately after the text finished typing, not giving me a chance to read it. It would also be nice if the tutorial could test whether a step has been completed before allowing the player to move on - my first attempt to explore the surface didn't land (misclick? bug? who knows?), but the game didn't alert me to this and I continued several steps in the tutorial not realising I hadn't even completed step one. I restarted the tutorial with this quirk in mind and then the crash came two minutes later.

The actual strategy part of the game might be excellent, but after this initial poor impression I just didn't want to give it any more of my time. Sorry to the dev, I really wanted to like this game :(

rollingthunder
rollingthunder

Please keep working on this! Right now the game is fun and can hold your attention for a while but can feel a bit like a grind.With some improvements i think i would play for hours since there are not many good terraformation games out there at the moment. I see so much potential in this, please continue to work on it

CaptainMorrigan
CaptainMorrigan

Other than it taking forever without a lot of tasks/assignments the game is decent. Its a middle ground resource management game.

Biggest issue I have is that there are tasks that are provided that its not reasonable or even detailed on how to achieve that goal (asked me to explore 7 regions, not sure beyond the 3 original probes how to do that)

My negative review is because it won't launch. Can't figure out why. No errors on screen but getting some steam crash report that doesn't launch. Just continual attempts to launch and nothing. Other games are launching so its specific to this game, no mods or console commands so not sure why. Gonna go play the other games I have until it works.

dmckinney2
dmckinney2

It takes awhile to get into the mechanics of it all (I'm still trying to figure it out). That being said, with almost a 100 hrs, I'm addicted. Wish we had more vehicles though..., pretty much that's my only complaint, GREAT GAME!

TheARate
TheARate

Reshaping Mars is an interesting colony simulator. The map of Mars is huge, and there are plenty of reasons to keep expanding. The terraforming mechanics are fairly involved, with each element of the planet affecting others- increasing atmospheric pressure helps to retain planetary heat, for example. There are lots of mechanics to keep track of, and it can be a bit overwhelming, but I really enjoy it.
The game also has many cool features- such as being able to see your infrastructure from the planetary view.
The game does have its problems, however- and you'll find places that could need some quality-of-life changes every once in a while, but it's still rather fun. The developer also makes very frequent patches to the game, and is extremely receptive to criticism and requests for improvements. I really recommend at least giving this a try.

RawCode
RawCode

Way too much grind before you can do anything related to "reshaping" and too much grind in general.

Game literally demand you to watch pain drying for hours before you can research very first tech that allows you to do anything ever remotely related to terraforming.

Exanimus Sativa
Exanimus Sativa

developer engages well with the community and for this type of game at it's current stage of development i consider that important. several unique features also make this different and more fun that others of the settle/terraform mars types. could also see this game spread it's wings to other planets besides mars as the mechanics would lend themselves well to other colonizing scenarios.

Lady Loveless
Lady Loveless

I enjoy the game a lot! I can spend hours in it. I DO like the new version as it is more accurate to a real life experience on Mars, but I do miss a story line. This doesn't have to be involving aliens or something fantastical, but just more guided goals or a persona to follow along with you would add that extra piece to the game to continuously keep you engaged.

I will be playing regardless, I enjoy the game very much, but those are my comments for the current version.

OzzieWorm
OzzieWorm

It's an alright game... and I'm still very much "early game" but it's slowly becoming into a grind-fest of mining out chunks of the gameworld... and I haven't even gotten into another territory yet.

But mostly... it feels like a semi-idler where if you want to expand you need to go eat up more resources from somewhere to stock up your base to expand then you can just sit there for a while. Maybe grab some ice to top-up your water.

But it seems it's going to get super grindy as your cities get bigger and bigger. I'm at around 600 pop and all I've had to do, instead of specialising in a tech to improve my work thus-far. Just dump down 10+ basic buildings to spit out basic food, consuming those earlier basic resources.

Looking at gameplay vids from a year ago... where is that game? I wish I saw these videos 4 hours earlier and I'd probably have skipped this entirely.

I dislike the mining ability is to just make giant holes in the ground. Why can't we tunnel? There's about 20-30 layers at a glance of terrain on maps that could potentially be dug down to... do I need to play lego? Why do I have to build ramps everywhere... it should be graded declines for a 1-step down terrain automatically anything more, then I need to digout terrain or build special ramps for it.

Roads: Everything is 1-tile wide... I was fully expecting expressways to be 2-wide behemoths so built accordingly to allow for that. Nope, single lane everywhere.

Water/Sewage connections: Every building needs manual connection of 2 different pipes to be automated in the basics. If we're going to city-building and can magically transport power to all buildings, let us magically transport water/sewage... even if it's 1-square away from a pipe. Think SimCity style of water management. (I like the separate pipes to manage it, but maybe have sewage pickup further than water supplies? who knows....

Production chains: need some centralised way to view and manage this. Also bulk paste of specific settings would be amazing. Having to hit "Paste" on 20 buildings to change my production configs is a PITA each time. Let me set it in a central panel.

Mining: Click dragging over an area should mine on that plane of reference only. Currently if you drag on something 1-2 layers higher and you span over empty space. It'll mark lower layers for mining, when you wouldn't want it to do taht.

Power: Solar + Wind should be available from the start. Solar should be cheap and easy and wind a little more costly. Considering the fact wind is 24/7 and Solar is beholden to the sun availability...

There's other features/functions I'd mention but overall I'd rate this 4/10, the earlier gameplay from looks on videos I'd rate 6.5/10. I cannot imagine having to setup new hubs from the beginning in new zones. SURE I'll get new tech with bigger/better accommodation/food production/materials production etc. But after 4-hours... of ridiculous rinse-repeat click grind on things it's just gonna do my head in.

[OMA] Dark-Noir
[OMA] Dark-Noir

For under 10€ you get two nice Mars colony simulations that are completely different from each other.
The legacy version reminds me of Stellaris/Civilizations and the new/normal version is more like Rimworld/Factorio but with terraforming.

If I were the developer, I would have released two games for at least 10€ each :D

SUN
SUN

A true game changer:
Like the description suggest, this update is a huuuuge overhaul. Or better put, this is the version 2 comparing to the last game which was published one year ago.
And to describe my feeling after playing the game for the first 4 hours, the best words that I can find now in my head is that: the strategic RTS genre hasn't seen this bold and visionary game for a long time, this is going to be a true game changer in the genre And I truly believe, that this game is going to lead a series of in the future that deeper examine the logic behind human exploration of the galaxy. (Mars as one of course)

Now when I'm saying that, it's not to say I haven't noticed several bugs within the game. But I have confidence in the future debugging and developing of this game. Especially, let's not forget that this is a indie game that by the time it was released, mainly developed by one person.

What I'm suggesting is to focus on the scope of the author instead of the narrative. When I'm saying that, I'm thinking how Civilization series introduce the technology tree lacking a bit of sense how each technology is related to the resources that has been collected society-wise. I'm also saying that how most of the RTS strategic games failed to think how civil numbers, happiness,facility production capacity and efficiency intertwines and casting influence to each other. I was especially happy that in this game the author has thought about that and had a realistic interpret in the system logic.

Of course, adding all these layers of information is also going to make the learning curve steeper and the controlling more complicated. And players who are new to all these concepts are going to find themselves puzzling and hesitating a lot in the beginning. But I would highly recommend them to take it easy and step by step. After all, this is not a fighting game or a FPS which you are looking for instant pleasure and heads of the enemy. Rather, I think the player can treat this playing experience as reading a Si-Fi novel. Peeking into the future, and reflecting on what's happening now. Asking ourselves, how do we human actually set foot on this once dangerous and wild blue planet that now we calls home? And with all the tech we have now, is it guaranteed that we will be able to extend the human foot track beyond that deep dark sky?

Hope you guys all will find the answer by yourself in the game and much of fun!~ My human fellow!

The Teal Bandit
The Teal Bandit

Just down not seem like a fun game. Animations and graphics are not good. Sound design is not good. Music is either way over the top or completely absent. At fast speed, I get more than 1 notification a second to tell me a worker is idle or a person is exhausted even when they life directly adjacent to their workplace. Overall seems like a more primitive version of surviving mars

Weeb Nation
Weeb Nation

Honestly, the game is fun setting up everything and unlocking new techs to improve the lives your pops. The game reminds a lot of Banished but now on mars!

Though, it's gotta be said that some of the mechanics in the game lack polish or are just not worth having. The best example is influence where I can just spend 20 to get rid of bad traditions so at the end I am unaffected by the event.

Other example is fiber production. There is fiber production building towards the end game where you start terraform but before that ye good luck lol. Fiber is just a byproduct of farming but essential for certain goods like fiber boards (to make houses), clothes or for combustion. For the life of me, I could not produce enough fiber ever since I wanted to make basic clothes....

Also, trade is a bit weird like I earn so much daily that I can just buy everything including the pop every batch. I wish I could refresh the batch or shorten the duration for it...

So, dev if you read this. Please give me some kind of fiber only production building for early/mid game or buff the byproduct rate of hydroponic farms 🙏

Tumis
Tumis

As a returning player of "Reshaping Mars," I am excited to see the game's transformation after a year. Some initial thoughts on the first few hours of gameplay in the updated version:

The new version has managed to capture me with its meticulously designed planetary environment setting. I can see the developer put a lot of effort into creating the vast and complex construction systems that almost covers every aspect I could think of surviving on Mars, which ensure the gameplay remains engaging and never dull.

Also it stands out among the construction games with a grand ambitions. It provides players with a thought-provoking chance to delve into the serious implications of space exploration, rather than inventing tawdry, immersion-breaking elements for the sake of entertainment.

Of course, the game is not perfect at this stage, but I am looking forward to the developers refining it over time. One aspect I hope will be improved is the balance between player freedom and narrative-driven progression. While the developers have provided each target as detailed as possible to achieve the ultimate objective, the lack of phased guidance or triggered events (at least within a quite long time I haven’t encounter any), that can make it easy to lose direction or fall into a grinding routine. I suggest offering more instruction for new players in the standard mode, while creating another high-freedom mode for experienced players who seek more personalized gameplay and further challenge. Additionally, I miss the small interesting events instantly reflecting the situation of immigrant residents in the older version. Removing this part somehow makes me feel detached from the world I’m operating.

The game has come a long way with its many updates including this huge one, and I am excited to see how the game continues to evolve. With further UI refinements and mechanism optimized and necessary debug, I hope it could become a must-play for fans of the construction and space exploration genres.

Hade
Hade

Lag is killing this game.
Around mid game I have to quit, too much lag.
Dev decided you needed to see all your population running around, some pointlessly. This causes severe lag when your pop count gets high. I got to 4k pop and had to quit which was about mid game. Rather then going to the nearest service, they run around all over the place, some getting stuck Playing the robots? Why go to the nearest recharge station when you can run to the one several blocks away.

Game pace is too slow even at max speed. I just run it at max speed. Waiting on everything to be made and research.

Beginning of game is confusing. You have to search around for the probes you need to scan the surface. Sometimes they're behind the planet. Same for the pioneering station. When I first played this game I had a hell of a time with this mechanic.

Games are interesting when they keep the player busy doing stuff. Games get boring when all you're doing is waiting. And there a lot of idle time in this one. Also this game does not respect the players time with a limited vehicle count of 100. High tier vehicle count as 2. This just pointlessly drags the game out. Mining is very slow. Vehicles often get stuck. Any vehicles over the limit have to be moved manually or they won't move at all.

Regional transports get confuse as what they need to deliver, you manually have to assign. I had missing cargo, and resources showing up that I didn't even order for a region.

This game is also a micromanagement game. Too much of it. You pay your people a certain amount that needs to be constantly adjusted. They in turn pay you for services. Frankly this could have just been left out. Typically your pop will usually be in debt because of this mechanic. If they're not in debt, then you are. Money is used to pay your pop and buy supplies that are shipped from earth every 24 days. All the supplies are unsorted making it look like a mess and you hunt for the ones you need. I understand why most games just collect a tax and don't delve any deeper after playing this one.

You'll be constantly bombarded by messages that you have no control over. They're exhausted, everything is too far, etc.
It's even too far when it's right next to their house/work. Even playing the robots you still get all the messages. Robots only need to recharge, they don't need food or housing. Yet they're exhausted and everything is too far. I even had people die from exhaustion. Who cares, I just get more. Every person also has their own name. What do I care if my 5k population has names. Doesn't that just make the game more laggier having to remember all that useless info?

You also get messages that building or population are idle. Farms that are growing stuff are also considered as being idle. The buildings you can flip thru to see what's going on. However you can click on idle messages for people but will have no idea why they are idle., then they'll disappear into a building and that will be that until the next person is considered idle for what ever reason. When water is not flowing like it should be to buildings, there will be a ton of these idle messages (with a ping). Water arrives, message clears, then another ping for same building, over and over, etc. Gets annoying hearing that all the time.

The surveying has got to be the most annoying thing in the game next to some random person or robot learning a new skill. It's just constant pings. The right half of the the screen typically fills up making it impossible to do anything until the messages clears.

Another issues I have is that of you want to make 10k of something, you can't type it in (unfortunately), you have to hold the mouse button & key down to get it up there. Denominations are 1, 10, 100, 500, infinite. On the plus side you can copy the exact orders to another building.

Storage is too small. Most of your base will end up as storage once you get into the millions of resources. The biggest storage holds 24k of 2k stacks. How does that help with the millions I need to store? And there will be millions if not billions. Last game I was in the billions, was forced to use modded storage (that the dev made, holds 5 million, still most of the base was storage). And yet you can't add that into the base game? If there is too much lying on the ground your game will crash.

Also resources regenerate once they are covered up. Don't have enough of a raw resource or are just plain bored? Just build more land over it and dig it up again and again.

Did I mention this was a mining game? Takes a long time to flatten out a region. Vehicle are too slow to mine. Buildings are too slow to make anything. Get's boring laying down pipes for the thousandth time (water, sewage, logical). I have plenty of water but my buildings are always out of water. Suspect the water and logic pipes are bugged since my vehicles have to make pick-up/deliveries to all buildings most of the time.

Regions are a bit confusing. On the orbit side all regions are hex. But when in region view they're all squared. Zooming out to far will bring you into orbit view. I find this mechanic really annoying when I'm trying to see the entire region. Also when in orbit view, you can look at various info like height or resource density. But one you move the planet around to see another spot it automatically defaults to regular view. So once again you have to select height or resource view.

At some point you have combat. Why? It's you vs some Martian bugs. Though I've never seen them nor have any desire to see them. How am I supposed to fight anything when I can barely move anything due to severe lag.

On the plus side, buildings will produce without workers (though very slowly). You can also filter your storage. Useful when you're ready to strip mine the next region. But since transportation is bugged, you will usually have to order supplies multiple times after you build the logistics hub. And transport airplanes are slower the molasses.

I find that plastic is the bottleneck in the game. You have to turn resin into plastic which can only be gotten by building a gazzilion farms. Everything needs plastic. Playing the robot empire? It takes a lot of plastic to make 1 bot.

The robot empire is locked initially. To get more population you have to build them. Takes forever to make 5k robots. You need millions of plastic units. In every game I was always out of resin and plastic and not enough pop. More farms more pop needed, a never ending cycle.

I like the game. But since it's impossible to actually terraform Mars due to lag, I can't recommend it until it's fixed. I've restarted this game 21 times and have yet to actually terraform Mars. Either I hit a bug or too much lag to continue.

Added note:
Might be dev notes from previous initial review.

DrSimpatia
DrSimpatia

I haven't finished this game yet but, this is a no brainer of a "Yes" review.
7h of gameplay and I've barely scratched the surface in terms of research and so on.
It's an extremely cheap price for the content that you're getting.

It doesn't seem to be too difficult although you will have to keep managing (almost micro managing) the resources that you're getting. Mostly because Water and Metal are both gathered a lot via mining. And I know other rare metals, like Uranium and what not, will also have to go through the same route, which means more managing.
The problem with this is that mining is done manually. You hover your mouse over the land and when you see that the land will give X resources, you click on a button and you select all the places around it that you want to mine. Meaning you will end up doing this a lot of times. However, that definitely didn't bother me at all, I was rather addicted to that part. The rest of the game plays similar to every other civilization game:
- You have to manage your food production to feed your citizens;
- You have to manage the resource production to maintain the base, future techs, etc;
- You have to terraform the planet (this is a bit different from other games but, for Mars related civ games, this is right up that alley with a bit more complexity);
- You have to keep your citizens happy.
One cool thing about the citizens is that they can go into debt from spending money and not making as much but, all of that can be adjusted, so you have your own way of economy.

In terms of replayability, there are other side campaigns that you can do once you finish the main one but, like I said, I'm at 7h of played time and I'm not even half way on the main campaign.

For a 7 euros game, that's already 1 euro per hour, which I find to be very well valued. I'm guessing it will end up being worth a lot more once I sink more hours in (which for sure will happen)

brantodb01
brantodb01

It's almost good...ish
The biggest problem is trying to find the fun.
It's not challenging, just monotonous. It felt like the game just wanted me to build more of what I've already done. I wouldn't even want it to be hard because it doesn't seem very deep, you don't have that many options.
I had money problems early game, I built a gym and...everyone spent so much money going to the gym I didn't have money problems for the rest of my 5 hr run. Not that excess money matters anyway when all it really gets you is more misc materials

A fundamental flaw I think the game has is that (seemingly) your production lines are limited by your engineering vehicles, which are also what's used to mine and build everything. Meanwhile If I'm setting up production chains, like the game wants me to do, I'd like to have a dedicated transport service (teamsters, conveyors etc) to factor in

plus the UI is clean but ugly, looks very indev for a full release

tldr; needs more fundamental work and idk if it's gonna get it now it's the full version

ENAK
ENAK

It's a very nice Mars colonization game which includes the aspect of terraforming the planet. You also get a second game - a previous version which worked very much differently. It's fun, demanding, looks nice too. The price is very low - I feel like it actually should be higher. :)

SIutMonkey
SIutMonkey

Terrible feedback loops. No info. No supply chain info. No resource trees. Terrible sound.

Did the devs even look at ANY other similar games?!?!?

Game glitched out - went from 1000 pop to nothing for no reason. Plenty of food...

Don't waste your time with this.

BlueOrange
BlueOrange

Not a bad city-builder with a reasonably simple flow of goods. A few minor flaws in the user interface that aren't too bad once you get used to them. The 'Reshaping' thing is refreshing and very literal - as you dig for resources, you'll put massive holes in the ground that have an impact on the layout of your city.

Fenrir
Fenrir

I have played another game called Surviving Mars, though it was easy, this game (Reshaping Mars) adds more conditions where you need to keep in mind. Although the game is well rounded, I would like to see a custom game option with some or all of the conditions that are available and able to select 3-5 options (at best) or change conditions on a slider (would prefer the slider). Hope you guys cam make it so.
To get it unlocked, it could be after you finish 5 Years in one game.

I would also like to see a research option doubled condition.
As a form of new unit, a cargo hauler. Something that hauls items to and from locations.

Pirdy
Pirdy

In it's current state this is a good game. Not great, but good. Now having said that, based on the development history of this game and the future prospects of continued development, this could easily become an awesome game. I recommend this game and look forward to continued development. Even in it's current state with no further updates the game is well worth the $9.99 price tag.

Atreides Warrior
Atreides Warrior

This game was well worth buying for a fun and interesting take on citybuilding on mars. Well worth the money I paid even though it was sort of clunky on how mechanics in the game work it could easily be fixed. The part that was annoying was having to run all the pipes and plumbing to every building and had vehicles constantly getting stuck while mining. I put in 67 hours into the game and all but a few of those hours were pretty chill and enjoyable.

The thing that almost made me miss trying out this game is the endless blast of alerts for things that you can never fix. Every time a unit or building stops for even a second you get an annoying sound, basically every time someone isn't happy for any of a dozen reasons you get a message. Because each colonist has unique personalities some are just finicky and will always complain the entire game. You will have to constantly see the message that they are not happy with you off to the side the entire game. If there is a way to disable or filter them I couldn't find it so I had to play the game with sound effects turned off the whole time and put up with the screen spam which was tolerable, but still very distracting.

Estroya
Estroya

I only played the new version.

tl;dr: bad performance, bad game systems, bad UI. Good idea, bad execution.

At the beginning the game tells you that you will question wether it will have been worth it to terraform Mars. The answer is no.
The game has massive performance issues once you have over 1000 people living there. It gets laggy to a point where mouseinputs aren't registered and the cameramovement is stuttering. Spreading the poulatinon out on multiple also does not really help. It's not the pc performance that's the issue, ressourceusage of my pc never went over 50%. It's just thousands of entities pathfinding around. At one point I killed off all pop and the performance became better (hooray for casual genocide I guess).
Lots of elements of the game are poorly made, transporting materials to other regions is bad, pathfinding is just bad and the money system is completely unnecessary. You pay the people wages and they give the money back for food, rent and services. It's pretty much a closed system. I just let ppl get into debt and then gave them their money back every few days. The only way to change the amount of money in the system is by trading materials with earth.
A lot of notifications are annoying und impossible to turn off, for example when people upgrade their skills. I don't care wether some random person is now capable enough to be an engineer, just get to work. You don't need to play a stupid sound for me, you won't get my approval, just make metal sheets.
The UI is bad, a lot of things are just randomly sorted when they could be properly sorted, bubblesort is not that hard to implement. And you can't input numbers directly, so have fun holding your musebutton.
A lot of the production is completly unbalanced, which causes some of the materials to just pile up without a use.

Also there are uranium powered insects at some point, but i never saw them, which makes me question their existance and reason for doing so.

Because progressspeed is dependent on the willingness to play a slideshow, this somewhat turned into a boring idlegame of waiting for hydrogenbombs to be produced and gas to be vented.

WafflzTK
WafflzTK

I am genuinely thoroughly enjoying the experience of this game. I love to set up a civilization and tinker with the small things to really make my colony grow. I hope that one day the game will have more planets to colonize.

Stikz3k
Stikz3k

Actually a fun game, very dynamic world tho it's very grindy.

For it's price, it's quite worth for the time you're gonna spend in it.

I recommending to wait for guides and shit since some of the mechanics and balancing are quite confusing and hard.

Tacheron
Tacheron

Having played 100 hours (of which a sizeable chunk was afk due to my gaming availability), I'll give this a recommend, although it's one of those in between games. I don't have the will to finish the game as it's insanely grindy, which wouldn't be an issue if my fps didn't drop to below 10 when I unpause due to the pathfinding of thousands of AI inhabitants. I can see that 0.1% of people actually terraformed mars all the way and I tip my hat to them.

As for the game itself, it's cool enough if you like base builders. You'll manage a lot of production chains in a factorio-ish type of way. If you get far enough, you'll open new regions for settling to maybe make mining outposts to send to your main base. You'll drop bombs into the planet core to reheat it again and much more. I definitely got my money's worth but in all it left me lacking the sense of accomplishment you get from actually finishing a task. I'd probably have to dump another 30-50 hours into this to finish it and I cba to do it.

Neptune
Neptune

a big yes !
The developer whisked up another game besides the (first) legacy game : Reshaping Mars
Which you will get included, just turn it on through the Beta option in Steam.
So there are two versions the first with the Hexagonal tiles and the second with a big Mars planet to explore..

This second version of: Reshaping Mars is a complicated society/city base builder.
The city/base building is intense and will take time to set up well learn it and to balance it.
The humans are fussy (but you can start a scenario with androids later).
And after that comes the terra-forming of Mars which is your ultimate goal.

You can spend hours learning things and balancing things, having fun.
And it is a pretty game.
Mind you, the second Reshaping Mars was newly released and the developer is very active with more content/ the workshop (massive warehouses yay !) streamlining and balancing things.
Really for this price it is very much worth it.

tigerdan04
tigerdan04

A very fun game and so much more fun than Surviving Mars.

After around 100 hours, here are some tips:
-Use the leveling tool. You can setup your dudes to mine a TON this way, without you having to constantly reset the mining area.
-Androids are KINGS. Androids don't need to eat, sleep, or have a residence; they just need to charge. This will impact your money, but will put your productivity through the roof.
-Money problems are always solved by offering more goods (the more complex, the better) or just increasing the rent/price of food. People will die without food, but they will still work when heavily indebted.
-Lots of buildings will work without residents, just at a super slow production rate. When you setup new outposts, don't be afraid to make buildings there if you don't have enough residents for them. Residents just speed up the process!
-Logistic Tubes are awesome. Logistic tubes work like water and sewage, in the sense that you hook them up the same way, but they transfer items. This frees up your dudes to do more mining, etc., and you're going to need this for the huge Nitrogen push you'll need around the end.
-Dealing with excess? Remember that food can be composted too, instead of dirt and water, and you can always use the cargo ejector to throw some crap into space, if you need the spacebucks.
-There are some mods in the workshop that add things like super warehouses. These are extremely useful, as the Large Warehouses are super small in comparison.

Have you found the bugs in the ice? I keep look for them, but I can't seem to find em! PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU'VE FOUND THE BUGS!!! I made a ton of Nuclear Crushers to fight them when I started and ended up just detonating them to mine more quickly, when the bugs didn't show after the event message.

Best $10 I've spent all year!

Terod
Terod

Bought the original (legacy) version some time ago for a few bucks and was neither disappointed nor elated but man... what an amazing move by the devs to basically gift you a free game. It's not without its flaws, lacking a few quality of life features, and has optimisation issues but it's still great and well worth its money.

Cementiet
Cementiet

Its a game that shows promise, but..

Reshaping Mars has quite an interesting idea but does not execute it very well. It goes for a grand scale but becomes very tedious due the lack of quality of life game play. It is the first game i played where it is lucrative to let your citizens die and replace them with a new ones.

Issues i had:

The big:
-Frame rate, the game looks alright, but graphics compared to frame rate is horrible (GTX3070) CPU is on 20% ish.
-Pipes, why do i need to connect them to every single building (even with shift function), placing them under a building should be sufficient
-Roads and cliffs. why is this a thing? transport in new regions is such a hassle its not worth it. make it roads only and ramps automatic.
-I have no idea why i would care about luxury items, there is no downside, just scale up normal production
-It should be drastically more easy to transport items between regions without vehicles limits, its confusing and annoying.
-Solar panels, either make wind more hard to use or buff solar panels, they currently are useless.
-Asteroid scanning should be automatic for desired asteroid, also for asteroid locking and ''crashing''

The Small:
-Why does every building look like an X-mass tree with the green lights, (use apartment style its clear and elegant)
-Why does every building feel like its made with completely different materials (color scheme etc)
-Research needs an serious re-balance
-Naming and placement of buildings in the building menu is strange and confusing
-Events have achievements, but they can not be gained if the rotation does not activate if things are ''under control''
-The game is really too slow.
-Why do i always see my pipe network? hide automatic this if not needed
-Item transport pipes should be underground like normal pipes, with small structures looks quite weird and with larger structures it intersects.
-Scale of items (cows? they are massive) it all seems a bit off

Again it is not an bad game especially for its price, but i would not recommend it in its current state, i tried to explore functions and try to sit it out, i had some fun but in the whole picture it was not enjoyable enough.

spark.milanders
spark.milanders

This game is great so far. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it sooner and the low price is great. You build on a large scale. It's mostly about Production and keeping your colonists happy and fed. Definitely worth the price.

blondie201649
blondie201649

Love this game, enjoyable, challenging and interesting.

Waldleufer
Waldleufer

So far a very nice terraforming game.

There is one thing we need very desperate though: Key remapping.

However I see a lot of potential in this, nice done Tholus Games!

Anonymous
Anonymous

solid RTS with light conflict, and long term playability.

jammin411
jammin411

Just too repetitive. Build admin center, build housing, balance resources, repeat. Stuff that should be automated is not like hiring Humans to work in facilities. Hiring humans is bound to a resource and the population simply grows much quicker than jobs or resources can be created. May be worth it in the future, but in its current state I recommend waiting.

Wegadin
Wegadin

Excellent price for an excellent game. There are a few bugs and logistics issues, but the story is complete, the research tree is robust, and the game really takes you on a journey from the dusty sands of Mars to an ocean-front paradise.

Commander frank
Commander frank

The bugs, the bugs are the greatest enemies besides almost getting a game over in the first war. I think this is a pretty good game and I like how the start menu changes as you go on.

DerGoldBärWerner
DerGoldBärWerner

Great Game can last your first playthrough for about 24h, its concept is neat, and making progress feels great aswell, it is however missing certain needed Quality of Life features, things like managing your population can get very Management heavy to a point where you could just give up and not care about it, and you barely have population control other than moving them around essentially, but the game is very forgiving in that regard, i had lategame about 22k People of wich 10k didnt have a job, and i only had Living space for about 16k people, and my Economy was BANGING.

sal17_a
sal17_a

It's super addictive, while a bit of automation would be great in the future, its great for the time it's been out and it'll probably only get better with time!

Jorgas
Jorgas

No WASD (or setting to rebind keys from arrow keys), mouse locked to application in all 4 display modes, extremely repeatable, you sit and do the same thing (building, upgrading, adding drones, adding workers) over and over. weird tilted 3d menus, that is just weird and confusing for the eyes. no settings for mouse/zoom sensitivity ,
insane amounts of popups, happening every 5-10-15 seconds without stop, the research descriptions don't rly explain anything, missing alot of descriptions, tooltip/things not explained, tedious exploring in the start (and the games tool tip says you need to research auto exploration, which could not be found in the tech tree) . tutorial broken in first step, no matter how many times i marked the things under the popup box, it would not progress (10 seconds into the tutorial, so had to restart and disable the tutorial to get that box away)
missing simple features like telling you how much bonus you get next to / inside a admin jurisdiction before you place a building, buildings not telling you when they will get bonuses before you place them

and these are just some of the myriad of issues that i found while just testing the game for ~2 hours.

but hey at least it's cheap.

Jacofalltrades
Jacofalltrades

our four gas giants all have rings, three of them are just much harder to see. An excellent stratagy managment game that is weirdly deep.

crazySith08
crazySith08

I was slightly skeptical about this game when I saw how little hard drive space it took compared to many of the games I played. Would I like this game? I decided to boot it up to give it a brief try before dinner. An hour later I remembered that I still needed to make dinner. This game is highly addictive, simple to learn, but more challenging to master. I thought I was doing okay, and then suddenly I ran out of resources necessary to build anything further. I've barely begun to play this game, but I can already tell that it's going to be a very fun and addictive game.

The only thing change I would make at this point would be to allow further zooming out. I feel like the amount visible on the screen is sometimes not enough, especially when looking for hexes containing water, which seem to be very hard to come by at least early in the game.

MrMo
MrMo

Very enjoyable game. Definitely recommend

HeNk
HeNk

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.

Ignoxia
Ignoxia

This game has some interesting and engaging features so far. For an early access game you get a great deal of options in the core gameplay. There are still some improvements the developer is working on and they seem to engage with the community. I hope the developer keeps up on this as they are doing a fantastic job so far!

Nietsewitch
Nietsewitch

Tedious and overly long, sad, because it has a good premise.

Daniel.Kiwi
Daniel.Kiwi

Fun game
Similar to Per Aspera but without logistics / Transporting goods

Survey the ground, exploit Metal/energy/water then slowly build more complicated buildings as you research

Tantulous_Wilkies_World
Tantulous_Wilk…

After a rough start (game refusing to even update on a particular patch), this has shown some promise, the back story is ok but at times the game gets uneventful and i found myself just flying around in circles with the fighters until a new event popped up.
I'm sure there will be more added to this, or at least I hope there will, great recovery from initial attempt at playing.

Hardcore
Hardcore

If you love to manage people, adore Mars and dreamed of your own state with its own laws and regulations, then this game is for you! Welcome to the new world, my young lover of totalitarianism!

Your.SedoyGul
Your.SedoyGul

Reshaping Mars is a colony building simulator on the surface of a red planet, the ultimate goal of which is to terraform the planet to fit life. Gameplay it resembles Civilization, Surviving Mars and other representatives of a similar genre. We build buildings, extract resources to build even more buildings, develop science (the research tree here is very impressive), fight off all forms of intelligent and unreasonable life. In general, for fans of such strategies, it looks very attractive, I recommend it for purchase, but do not forget that this is early access and the game is actively updated by the developer.

VoicedGamer
VoicedGamer

I wish all games came with a 15 minute demo. The games content ran dry within 30 minutes. I don't want to be too harsh on the game devs but they should really invest in more activities. It's a space game so the options are limitless but their creativity is closed minded... There's no depth in the game its just expand your colony by placing down 3 basic buildings. then do that 50 more times. Where is the value to the gamer? Where is the struggle? Without hardship life is boring and bland. Provide a more dynamic experience and your game will sell very well. Cant recommend it right now.

renvalia
renvalia

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.

Toodixinya
Toodixinya

It's in early access so it's missing some features. As of 10/4/2021 I feel like I've experienced everything the game currently has to offer despite what seems like a short play time. Very simple mechanics (explore, expand your resources without exhausting them, mitigate crisis, deal with Earth governments, repeat until game ends or you don't feel like playing anymore). I don't think that it's fair to review this as a completed game or expect it to have the same quality as a game 2-3 times the price. Reshaping Mars is a competent resource management game that doesn't do anything new or special with a fair asking price.

Wolfsmoke
Wolfsmoke

Honestly after about 45 hours I can say that it's just not fun. 6 restarts just to try to survive the first attack. There's no sense of accomplishment because you never get a second to breathe. The game just throws more bs at you until you eventually get frustrated and give up.

Demented Dr. Spruce
Demented Dr. Spruce

Its a fun game as is kinda on the easy side with no challenging enemies. The end also isn't clear and there was one research that I could not open scaffiling . It is supossed to help keep buildings from falling which Never happened. Not sure if maybe the game isnt finished but My only remaining quest is find the lost rovers. Over all I give it a 4 out of 5 if they work on these things I would play it again.

sylviadonahoo
sylviadonahoo

This game has a lot of elements similar to Stellaris. It has an interesting story-line and the game has considerable depth for an early release game. At the price point, it had far more depth than I would have thought. I would say that there are some rough edges that I hope to see smoothed out in the future. There are a lot of popups that got repetitive and the game definitely has an element of grind. I think the graphics and the sense of satisfaction at actually watching the changes take place on Mars outweigh that though. If you are looking for a combat-oriented game, I would say look elsewhere.

Overall, I found it enjoyable. I think once I finish the whole game, I will do a second play-through so I can plan out my cities better and play around with some of the tech again to see what all I can do.

Overdrive
Overdrive

Don't forget it's still in early access. Requires some polishing but the premise is pretty good. Addictive.

Chronicles
Chronicles

This game is like a crap version of Surviving Mars. Everything about this is tedious. The sheer amount of interruptions from dialogue boxes make me want to punch the game in the face.

The enemy isnt really that much of a threat, and the fact that the bugs appear in the middle of the base is annoying. They really should of made all enemies build bases somewhere else on the map, and you need to send a military force to destroy their base/hive.

The only threat this game has is the millions of dialog boxes that will show constantly, which u willl spam skip until u reach the spend X resources to stop disaster or face the negative debuff for a time.

If you haven't played Surviving mars or Per Aspera , i recommend those games instead, if you have played them, go play them again, cause this will give you cancer.

Anonymous
Anonymous

So much to do and balance if you enjoy a game that you need to think about you will love this

maskinner
maskinner

i purchased this game it was working fine. i played fine for 39 hours then all of a sudden it just stopped working
and now it wont even load. i have been trying to get it to load now for about 2 weeks but no luck. i asked for a refund but because it played well for 39 hours no refund, so i have a game worked fine for 39 hours and now it wont even load. I am really annoyed, and i do not know what to do.

64bitrobot
64bitrobot

The demo for this charmed me way back when. It was a little quirky and felt like it was held together with tape and just barely managing to keep itself from the bin of poor quality titles.

Anyways, that's a way of saying that this is...definitely not the best game out there about colonizing Mars. But what it is is charming and full of love for genre. It's not very difficult I'd say, though it certain throws plenty of challenges at you to try and trip you up, but if you build your colony well, you should be able to survive without issue. The early game is tight with managing to get enough power and minerals to continue to expand, making sure to find good locations for the first settlements, as having population work buildings is incredibly important and valuable.

The game has a bit of a story which I could charitably describe as heavy handed with author morality, which I'm willing to forgive mostly because the game has charmed me and the morality generally aligns with me. It's worth nothing that it lays it on thick though, that's not for everyone.

Anyways, in summary, games charming, not amazing or best in genre but it scratches the itch really well for me. I'd say where I'm at is a good portion of the way through the available content; I've just started to outpace everything the game can throw at me and don't expect there to be any real challenge from here on out. Which is pretty much exactly how I like the tail end of my colony/city building games to go.

QueenlyVenomous
QueenlyVenomous

meh, Its ok for the first 3 hours. Then 8 hours in im like WTH is happening here, im gettin gattacked, ive got sandstorms over my entire base, and im getting spammed by messages every 10 seconds. The next button is your friend even on standard mode.

Do i like the game...YES. Do i think it still needs love...YES. Stil neds a lot of work. For example, at one point i had like 10k minerals but only 34 steel yet i had ten plants going and all of them at max capacity.

Colonists, at one point i had like 20k colonists and not enough jobs or housing for them i couldnt build it fast enough and i couldnt get jobs fast enough cause i was busy fighting Locke while repaining from the sandstorm and that was on standard mode.. Im like dang stop breeding already

Graphics are OK. Nothing to write home about 7/10 on those

But overall i still recommend IF ON SALE...

Universum
Universum

More popups then a shitty mobile game.

Bored Guy
Bored Guy

Finished the campaign in 12.8 hours!
The game requires a lot of bugfixing, an interface overhaul, better AI, better auto-pathing, plus a number of many gameplay fixes to ensure that the experience is better, like reducing the number of giant notification and sounds and the AI voice reading all the notifications - Had to mute the game as playing on 3x speed was like a concert of madness.

Graphics - 7/10
Sound - 6/10
Gameplay - 4/10
Novelty of idea - 1/10 (And i`m saying it because it looks like a poor copy of Surviving Mars combined with Terraforming Marrs).

Overall experience 5/10

almeyers68
almeyers68

What I like about the game is searching around, to find out what is there. Then extracting the resources. Exploring the tech tree. Managing the population, putting them to work in the best jobs to move the colony ahead.
What I'd don't like and both are very minor:
Surveyors get hung up on some terrain features, when on auto survey.
No user Manual.
I think it is a very good game. I would recommend it.

bluesaka111
bluesaka111

Poorly design and optimized

> Poorly run with fullscreen mode

The game FPS fluctuate constantly and during auto save, well lets just say the FPS drop to the floor that last several seconds as least. Grind and repeat after that.

> Why on Mars this "Maximized window mode" exists?

Not only this is unnecessary (a duplicated version of Windowed mode) but the way this mode operate is stupid: Instead of matching the game's window dimension to desktop's WORKING AREA dimension (area that left over after subtract taskbar, docks, etc...), the game will match its window's dimension with the desktop display dimension instead.

This result in a large portion of the game screen being cut off and no way to access game functions like policies, employ administrator, build traffic, activate structure abilities, etc... Again, WHY?

> Bad UI and bad shortcut choice

> > Bad UI

Seems like the dev(s) have adopted EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE ON SCREEN as their motto when designing the UI.

For example, when you select an administrator building with basic policies unlocked then the "Implement policy" panel will appear and there no way to toggle this behavior.
This even more furious when you try to build traffic (connection node that will boost connected structure performance) because you can only build one traffic at a time and every time you have to close the Implement policy panel before you can click on the damned "Build traffic" button.

Another example is the story progression: the game will shove new panel with story progression at you with no regard to what you are doing (fighting corrupted corp / rogue mechanized colony / try to save colony from runaway collapse...)

> > Bad shortcut choice

All I can comment is "Why on Mars you choose to map camera movement keys as building selection key? WHY?"

Too much micro-management and too little macro-management

There simply too much micro management and most of it is not in a good way. Most of things you need to manually do is also repetitive like accept immigration from earth, appoint new governor when the old ones kick the bucket, construct drones for newly constructed production buildings, construct new traffic route (the most annoying activity in the game), activate building abilities like convert human waste into energy / fertilizer, convert plants into food, etc...)

The colonists is also require a constant baby sitting because they seems to lack the ability to move between habitat or looks for jobs on their own in their district (with everything satisfied).

On the other hand, the game provide very little way to macro management the colony. No way to understand the problems like "Why I cant hire colonist (with enough consumer goods, plenty of idle, with in administrator building area) to work at this building? Where is the mechanized army came from? Where that illegal immigrant camp located on the (mini)map?"

Potentials

New take on Mar colony sim

The game set in a near future where global financial collapsed due to over commitment to Mars colonization with good (some are out of this world) stories and events and with RTS style combat (with bad UI and you cant put them into a squad that you can quickly select with number keys / numpad). This reminds me of the old colony game like Space Colony - bad UI, confusing game mechanics, bad minimap and brain dead colonist that constantly require baby sitting but still a fun game to play for few hours.

Tl;dr

This game seems to be an indie project from first time and or inexperience indie developer(s) which has the potential to be great after a few patches that focus on improving GUI, better tutorial and in game messages, optimize game performance, adding new contents and re-balance between micro and macro management.

But for now, if you're interested, you should pick this game up now to support innovative indie games, or pick it up later (ideally after it receives a few patches or when version 1.0 arrive) if you dont want to take the risks with Early access games.