Surviving Mars: SimCity Meets Mars in Space Strategy Romp

Surviving Mars the strategy game

You want to go to Mars, do you? Well, why bother? As with Surviving Mars the video game you can cut out all the dangerous stuff and just stay in your home.

From Bulgarian indie team Haemimont Games, the title was picked up by Abstraction Games in the Netherlands in 2021.

In this strategy sim you oversee a colony on Mars and help human colonists survive. Yes, then, it’s PC classic SimCity meets the Red Planet. Hurray!

Surviving Mars in a Red-Based Strategic Battle for Human Survival

Strategy games remain very popular after the 1990s launched them into the gaming limelight. Our all-time favourite remains the genius might of Dungeon Keeper (1998).

Plenty of indie devs are now giving the genre a go, with Surviving Mars being something of a standout title with its relatable concept (humans going to Mars) and eye-catching marketing materials.

To our disappointment, the game’s graphical style doesn’t reflect the game’s cover.

Rather than being cartoony with that cell-shaded style it’s more realistic kind of polygon stuff. It’s soon no surprise to see why as Surviving Mars takes its strategy genre roots very seriously indeed.

This is a complex one and fans of the genre will rejoice in the vast array of features available across the whole game.

Top tip… take the tutorial before throwing yourself into the main game. You’ll need to get the basics down otherwise you’re not going far in this one.

But even that isn’t really enough. We highly recommend you watch a few YouTube videos of skilled players in action to grasp what’s ahead—the game is brutal and you’ve got to get your head around it pronto. Like this one.

In short, this is how it goes:

Resource management (an extensive part of the experience).
Colony building across the planet.
Resource management.
Tweaks to colonies.
Resource management.

To accompany its demanding gameplay requirements, the graphics do have a pleasant swish to them. Mars looks like Mars. It’s red.

However, it’s the beautiful (often outstanding) soundtrack that caught our attention. More on the music for this one further below.

That stuff complements the game enormously, but it is the gameplay that can let the game down. It’s fiddly, demanding, and a bit frustrating.

The attention to detail is vast as you bring in humans from Earth to Mars. Personality traits for people to bring on up include:

Laziness
Idiocy
Alcoholism
Pessimism
Reclusive
Hypochondriacs

Yes, that’s right, you can fill your Mars colony with raging alcoholics. Hurray!

There’s a lot on your plate here. Make a mess of things and the humans you bring to the planet will suffocate to death. Hurray! This is a bit like strategy jaunt Frostpunk (2018) which freezes your humans to death if you screw up.

So, yes, it’s a city-builder and a survival game.

One that received a largely positive response from the gaming press with scores around the 8/10 mark. That’s good! But only go into this one if you’re in the mood for something that’ll test your limits (and patience).

If you want something a bit different, more accessible, and fun then try out the clicker SPACEPLAN (2017).

Want to be tested the way NASA is?! Then go and work for NASA! Or just give Surviving Mars a go. Its peaks are impressive, its nadir one of niggling frustrations.

Wait Up! Surviving Mars Has an Outstanding Soundtrack!

One of the best bits of this experience is the music from George Strezov. He’s from Sofia in Bulgaria and works as a composer, conductor, and orchestrator.

He works on all sorts of projects, not just in video games, but we love his expressive work on Surviving Mars.

The soundtrack mixes bits of synth music alongside piano and alluring orchestral sets.

We like how it doesn’t bog itself down into trying to be sci-fi and extraterrestrial. Instead it’s focussed on expressing the human experience on Mars, bringing humanity up to the Red Planet.