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1 month ago
Surviving Mars’s Da Vinci update lets you build without gasping for breath
As well-liked as Surviving Mars is for its uncompromising look at offworld resource management (you can't order some next-day delivery oxygen if you're running low), it's not unreasonable to wish that there was an option to have it ease up a little. Now players can get a feel for its many spinning plates without your doom feeling quite so inevitable. The Da Vinci update, released…
2 months ago
Feature: The endless march of time
We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second. And what games they…
Amazon sold pirate copies of Frostpunk and Surviving Mars, among others
That big shop on the internet, Amazon, has been selling pirated copies of PC games, some do-gooders have discovered (or rather, sellers using Amazon as a storefront have been selling the pirate goods). The dodgy games include icy societal survival game Frostpunk and dusty martian city-builder Surviving Mars, which were being sold for the suspiciously cheapo prices of $3 and $4. If you bought one…
3 months ago
We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there. 2018 releases Jurassic World…
Feature: Mayors, tycoons, farmers, wardens, despots and demons
Base-building is de rigueur these days, what with all those survival games, Minecraft, Fallout 4 and now Fortnite, but before all that we had tiny top-down or isometric worlds in which we diligently built cities and dungeons and theme parks and rail networks. The central appeal of management games was and is that they give us an idealised sense of what it is like to…
A few updates later, Surviving Mars is quietly a much better game
We've diligently posted about DLC and similar gubbins for Surviving Mars, Haemimont and Paradox's good-ish space colony management game, over the past few months, but one thing we've not done is dip a finger into its red soil to check whether or not it's ready for new life to grow. Along with the DLC - most of it free - there've been a few major…
Surviving Mars’ new, free DLC tries harder to stop you surviving
You can go a whole game of Surviving Mars without triggering one of its 'Mysteries', though that's as much to do with a slightly dodgy interface as it is personal choice. But when you do the flip the switch and welcome uncertainty into your citizens' delicate lives, everything gets upended. I won't soon forget the legion of floating orbs that sucked all the heat out…
4 months ago
Surviving Mars ‘Curiosity’ update teaches old domes new tricks
Red planet colonisation sim Surviving Mars did a mostly stand-up job of transplanting Sim City tropes to a hostile new world, but a slightly iffy interface and an inflexible aesthetic perhaps meant that its high-stakes potato-farming wasn't always as epic as hoped. As is increasingly tradition for Paradox-published games - hey-o, Stellaris and Cities: Skylines - it seems long-term refinement is very much plan. We've…
6 months ago
There are too many idiots on Mars but that's about to change. Colony-building sim Surviving Mars, which pleased our Alec well enough when it launched last month, has received its first major patch. The update notes are a treat - not quite Crusader Kings, The Sims or Dwarf Fortress quality, but there's some solid stuff in there. "Colonists will no longer try to walk kilometers…
Feature: Mars a-rats!
John is elsewhere this week, squeezed into Brendan's luggage for a flight to San Francisco and the Game Developers Conference, so I'm here for the regular rundown of last week's top-selling games on Steam. This week, the letters R, A, and S are well-represented with strong showings from both Mars and rats.
Feature: Sim City amongst the stars
I shed a surprising amount of tears during the founding of my first red planet colony in Surviving Mars. None of those tears had anything to do with the pipe leak that killed 58 people, I hasten to add. For those, I just swore at my repair drones and made more colonists work gruelling night-shifts at the polymer factory so we could patch up the…
8 months ago
Feature: Attack the Block
The cubes are black, and shiny, and mobile. They hover in a neat, impossible stack outside one of my colony's larger domes, clicking delicately about one another, always returning to the same overall shape, harming nobody. My robot rovers form a cautious circle around them while my scientists scratch their heads and bicker. I look at the cubes, one of the many Mysteries of Haemimont's…
9 months ago
Feature: The year two thousand and eighteen is upon us
As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework…
1 year ago
Feature: Dome, Sweet Dome
The people living in my new habitat dome have jobs to do, that's what brought them to Mars in the first place, but when they finish work they have two choices: they can either go to the casino or the bar. I could have built a gym or some other kind of leisure facility, but I went with the casino and bar combo. It's what…
Surviving Mars [official site] looks like it's shaping up nicely, if you ask me. Made by Tropico 3 developers Haemimont, it's a base-building game set on the Red Planet in which you hunt for resources to power settlements housed in giant glass domes. Judging by the new trailer, featuring the first in-game footage, it's one to keep an eye on: there's the snappy animations of…
Feature: Not a god-awful small affair
During the opening hours, you won't see a single person in Surviving Mars [official site]. It's a bold choice, having impersonal robots out there laying the groundwork of a colony, but the benefits are immediately obvious when watching the game in action. There's a certain Factorium-like mechanical satisfaction to the flow of metal, creating supply chains that stud the surface with structures. The great advantage…
Paradox and Tropico devs announce colonial management game Surviving Mars
In a new partnership with Tropico developers Haemimont Games, Paradox have announced a Matt Damon simulator / colonial-management-city-builder Surviving Mars [official site]. It's a "hardcore management game" about the colonisation of Mars and if the short trailer is anything to go by, it'll be leaning toward the EVERYTHING GOES WRONG end of the management spectrum. One for Brendan, then, who does like to put poor…
