I stopped asking the question, “How can you make a survival city builder?” when my metal mine ran dry. That left me without materials to repair malfunctioning power cables, which caused my oxygen generators to go offline, resulting in the suffocation deaths of dozens of people in my previously thriving and wondrous Martian colony. Life on the Red Planet is always perched on the razor’s edge, which gives an engrossing and only sometimes frustrating sense of danger and urgency to a genre that’s usually laid-back and relaxing.

Your mission in Surviving Mars is to establish a permanent population of living, breathing, potentially insane humans on a sprawling, pleasingly rendered map based on real terrain data from our planetary neighbor. Everything from windmills to the little automated drones that run most of your infrastructure are done up in a Roddenberrian, clean, almost cute aesthetic that evokes a sense of optimism and comfort that’s almost comically dissonant with some of the disaster situations I found myself in. Over time, they will gradually accumulate a thin layer of red dust that helps things feel more lived-in, and serves as a nice visual reminder of which structures haven’t had a maintenance check-up in a while.

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“ How was I supposed to know that I needed a machine parts factory quickly?

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Getting all of these pieces to work together is no simple task, and you’re given relatively incomplete, almost bare-minimum advice on how to do so. To be fair, Surviving Mars is mostly a sandbox game in which you’re free to run your colony as you see fit, but there are certain benchmarks you’re encouraged to hit, like maintaining a colony of at least 100 people. As I was learning the ropes I spent a lot of time sitting around confused about what to do next while I waited for a crucial advancement to become available in the semi-randomized tech tree or for my pool of prospective colonists back on Earth to refill.Just about everything comes down to having enough of the proper resources and the ability to get them where they need to be, creating a complex supply chain puzzle. According to Surviving Mars, people need food, water, and oxygen to live. Since resources are constantly consumed to maintain every structure and power cable, rather than just when they’re first built, production needs to be kept up at a minimum baseline at all times. A break anywhere in the chain can lead to cascading, catastrophic failure. At the best of times, I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie where I had to figure out how to get life support back online before everyone died. At the worst of times, I was frustrated that I had nothing to do but wait for a new round of funding so I could order a rocket from Earth to provide a much-needed injection of crucial resources and get the production loop working again.

Luckily for those who would rather simply build an interesting Martian ant farm than constantly fight off a colony-wide cataclysm, there are lots of ways to tweak the difficulty to make Mars more survivable. Selecting from a nearly endless number of available colony sites allows you to decide how abundant certain resources are, as well as how often you’ll have to deal with natural disasters like meteor strikes. There are also several mission sponsors that have different advantages and drawbacks, some of which entirely change how you play.

“ You can certainly make your life harder on purpose by inviting alcoholics and antisocial creeps.

The International Mars Mission is essentially “Easy Mode,” with nearly unlimited funding that makes it very difficult to fail – people can’t breathe money, but with sufficient wealth you can constantly import everything you need from Earth on a precise schedule and never have to become self-sufficient. At the other end of the spectrum, selecting Paradox Interactive goes… about as well as you’d expect having a major interplanetary colonization effort funded by a mid-sized Swedish video game publisher would go. Cash is so scarce that there is no margin for error at all, and you have to execute every phase perfectly while budgeting down to the last scrap of metal to end up with a livable environment.I was more impressed by the mysteries - a set of semi-linear, choice-based tales that unfold over the lifetime of your colony. They deal with anything from the discovery of microbial life to battling a greedy corporation that wants to claim Mars’ resources for themselves, which involves some light combat in the form of a turret defense subsystem. A new mystery is randomly chosen from a pool of about a dozen at the start of each game, adding a lot of potential replayability.