Mars Vice

The writing is so good, and I'm in love with so many of the characters. [edit] It's been 8 months since I finished this game, and I'm still thinking about it. I love this world and it's characters. I just want to be in that world. I hope we get more stories in this setting.

I spent a good while looking forward to this one once I saw it. I was hoping to get an itch left behind by games such as Paradise Killer scratched. And, since I saw anthro characters, I figured it'd be even more up my alley. Overall, Mars Vice is a solid experience in my opinion. One thing I can say for absolute certain is that the artwork is incredibly polished with many designs that are incredibly eye-catching. The characters are all defined very quickly and in ways that are pretty charming. Everything else, though... It could make improvements for the next project, or if we ever return to Mars. First, though, I cannot get enough of our primary main character, Dax, in particular. That, at least, is good. A game like this rides and dies by having characters that are easy to like or get interested in, and that goes double for the protagonist. Anaya is a fun foil and helps ground an outside audience as the local person from Earth. Having these two in the spotlight is genuine good fun, particularly thanks to Dax being the openly wild one. One can never tire of a hotblooded investigator. However... I do wish that I had my brain tugging a lot more for the investigation. There can be a set path of course but I wanted to have a bit more agency when trying to figure out the truth of the matter as Dax. This is likely going to just be a "me thing" though if I had to guess. Meanwhile, the story is a bit... Well, it feels rushed. Not even just a little bit, just outright rushed. It's a nice, short game, but I do think things still went too fast in terms of pacing once we were getting out of the middle and especially the end. It's a shame too, because I think the setup is genuinely pretty alright. I liked what worldbuilding we got too. While the message got across, it didn't let the mystery fester for nearly long enough if at all. However, I reinstate that this is still a solid experience. The characters and the environments we do get to see really do help reel people in and make it fun. I still wanted to reach the end at the very least because of the fact I came to like Dax really quickly. I hope any future work takes the flaws of this project and moves on to improve on them in the next. And, hopefully, maybe one day we can come back to Mars. I think it deserves a whole lot more than what it got here.