Mars Attracts

I really wanted to like Mars Attracts, but right now it just isn’t there yet. The idea is genuinely interesting, a Mars Attacks-style park builder where you run a “human zoo” sounds unique and fun. And to be fair, the theme and humor do land. There is a good game hiding underneath all of this. The problem is the execution. The UI and controls feel clunky and unintuitive, especially when you’re trying to manage your park efficiently. Simple actions can become frustrating, and it ends up feeling like you’re fighting the game instead of enjoying it. On top of that, performance isn’t great — I ran into stutters and bugs that pulled me out of the experience more than once. Content-wise, it also feels a bit thin right now. You can see what the game is trying to be, but a lot of systems don’t feel fully fleshed out yet, which makes the gameplay loop lose its appeal faster than it should. Yes, it’s Early Access, but at this price, I expected something more polished or at least more engaging long-term. There’s potential here, but in its current state, it’s too rough and incomplete for me to recommend. Verdict: 4.5/10 (for now) This is the latest gamepaly https://youtu.be/2b-E9ghDs3w

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I was a little skeptical going in. At first if feels really underbaked. Like you're building cubes of concrete to hold Greco-Roman peasants licking hamster water drippers. Human zoos are cheap and gaudy peep shows. it is all really square and angular and it's impossible to make anything that looks better than baby's first zoo tycoon. this is intentional, it's old school campaign driven where you have to unlock pretty much everything. Where it goes from there is hard to describe and I honestly believe transcends the source material and its own genre tropes! It is a rock solid theme park builder. It has a solidly fun, very objective oriented campaign mode with the usual degree of pleasant plot. You rocket towards a ton of variety in everything from shops to rides to exhibits. That's all table stakes. Anyhow, you start making pretty human zoos. good help is expensive so you start hiring war criminal scientists to watch them from a guard tower. instead of feeding times you have scheduled alien probings (the humans are expected to bark for the crowd). that's fair! you're feeding them. you start sending raiding parties to abduct human groups that you start grinding into Ed Gein human skin thrill rides. the pro-human martians yell at you to improve concentration camp conditions and this is the laziest/easiest board member faction to side with, actually. it's a much more pitch black satire of capitalism than it comes across at first. my main point of feedback so far is that the humans submit far too easy and it would greatly enhance the game if there was more of a constant war of wits between you and the allegedly lazy humans. (the devs say this is the next update!)

Just to get the big caveat out the way first - this is an early access game and at the time of writing there's still quite a lot to be added, but it has so much potential it's worth buying in early (and buy the Supporter's Edition - it's not much extra and worth it for the Featurette if you want to get to know the devs and their plans for it). I'm betting that Mars Attracts will become a big sleeper hit. It is licenced (impressive for an indie studio) and it's got all the dark humour of the film. The focus of the game is around collecting humans to display, experiment on, and deconstruct using a similar, but slightly less annoying, mechanic to Two Point Museum, and there are other parallels with that game (the use of a grid rather than freeform and a similar cartoon style, etc). There's also the usual stalls and decorations, and some rides - although the devs are saying rides are very much secondary, so don't expect to be constructing rollercoasters down the line. Also at the time of writing, there humans from five eras to collect - Ancient Egypt, Rome, the Vikings, the Wild West, and the Space Age (the latter unlocks earlier with the Supporters Ed). With four maps that take a good few hours to get through (my game 'ended' somewhere into the fourth map). The experiments and tech tree are there but you can see there's loads more to come, some systems aren't implemented yet, and although I didn't find any bugs, there are some very minor glitches. But don't let that put you off. Ok, for the price you're not getting a complete game, but Mars Attracts is great fun and I'm going to be checking in on it regularly and looking forward to new content. So please consider supporting the devs early as I have a feeling this is one that's just going to grow on anyone who likes these sorts of games.

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They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries. 2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. 3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later. 4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can't predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society. 5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM 6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general. 7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, "politically correct" types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by "leftism" will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.) 8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. 9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization." Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential. FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY 10. By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism. 11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped" or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad") ack ack. (10/10)

I mean you get your very own human zoo. What's there not to love? I mainly like to take the old people and watch their grandkids cry. Leave them wondering if and when they will be next.

Already a very robust game while in early access, Mars Attracts answers the question nobody was asking: what if Zoo Tycoon was Mars Attacks themed? As with many early access games, you are bound to run into a few bugs, but the dev team is very responsive to bug reports and is actively patching the game. I've already sunk several hours in, most of them in the very early stages of early access, and as of March 2026, the game is feeling so much more fleshed out. Can't wait to see where things go from here!