Occupy Mars: The Game

This game has been in perpetual EA for what...like 8 years? development has been pretty much at a standstill for years. Now they say they are working on Co-op. Yay. How about finishing your F-ing game first? Do not buy this broken, janky, sad piece of junk. It will never be finished. They will just continue to drag this out for many years to come. Edit after dev response: Look at this dev response. What a bunch of little butthurt children. I held off on leaving any review for a LONG time. Then when I finally called them out for being the scam that they are, they got offended. Do NOT give these people money. Also, apparently they did not start development until the same day they released into Early Access. I deleted one of their nasty little comments they left (to actually do them a favor). So instead they abuse their ability to post directly into reviews. At this point, they've now responded to this like 3 or 4 times. Hilarious.

I watching this game closely for years. I did not buy before due lack of CO-OP. Since I like Satisfactory especially building electricity network this game is seemed promising. I bought recently due it was on sale and I saw COOP Beta tests. This game is good. It is EA stage but perfectly playable. What to expect? You can experience of about 2 minutes in the very begining at campaign mode that the characters and the look of the character is dull. The a dialogues are dull too. When the accident happens and you stranded alone in the MARS you dont get involved any character interaction anymore so problem solved. But..you stranded on planet mars. Despite the inventory is unrealistic - you can carry half a planet without a struggle - you are going to be facing a serious problems out there. Weather situation is deadly. The night cold deadly too. Power blackouts. Hunger. I have a base with the ATV. The vehicle is drained off and I dont have any food and my potatoes is still growing. Sandstorm out there and crafting medkits to survive to wait to have a potato, and blackout again. The plants are withering. If you open a door without equalizing pressure yes that happens. You have a soldering station you have to repair a PCB with replacing capacitors and any parts. Brilliant. It definitely scratches that kind of itch.

Game saves keep corrupting so is unplayable long term

Well, we hit 1.0 and its just not that great, never got the polish it deserved, graphics are so so, the sound is terrible and the flow of the game is just off. Its grind fest with very little reward. I have invested hours in this and I did like where it was going, but to me, it just never got there.

With just under 2 hours in this game, I'm going to say that the game still has a long way to go to feel "ready" for the new player. A few things popped up within these first 2 hours that I found super annoying, detracting from a reasonable new player experience. I'll try to recall what I experienced before the 2 hours were up. I started with The prologue, seeing as it said it was acting as a tutorial. However, it didn't effectively teach me all of the fundamentals for the game. In order, I was navigated through: - How to pick up items, use machines, - How to move around, use objects in the world, - The helmet - putting it on and off (which always resets your vision to 3rd person??) - Sleeping and resting is good, - Making Food and water, - Defecation yields waste, which you can recycle to fertilizer - How to replace a fuse, - Building a structure (light post?), - Repair circuit boards with a workshop, It did NOT teach me: - How does research work? How do I get more points to advance the tree? Turns out - doing stuff advances your tree. Grinding down structures, building things in the constructor, jack hammering rocks. They all have their own research trees. I had to look this up outside of the game, which is a major problem with bringing people in. Granted, having a gamepedia or fan wiki is OK, but don't let it be the only source of information on how some mechanics work. You need to include it in the game somewhere. - Update: I found out the tutorials in the pause menu have the mechanics for how it all works. Need to navigate to it, though. My suggestion for new players: Read what you can. - CO2 scrubber - If it reaches over 100 degrees it blows up. In the prologue, I tried twiddling with some valves not receiving any feedback on what I was doing. Turns out, each turn increased temperature by 10 degrees, and I was 3 turns away from a big explosion. Had the explosion happened, would the prologue know how to handle it? - Update: I figured out how it works with some tinkering. Other things that annoyed me: - In the prologue, after the "event" happened and I was put on a timer to evacuate.. I was given an impossible task - evacuate with the rest of the crew. Then another.. Evacuate in the emergency shuttle. On top of that, every airlock or doorway I had to go through I would lose health because of some damage and clipping outside? Then at the very end, I had a long stretch of outside, which also makes you lose health.. I died the first time because I didn't have enough reserve HP when I made it to the real outside for the emergency shuttle. Only after the game reset me back to the beginning of that stretch with more HP did I make it out. - Update: In the tutorials, I read a helpful tip for how to navigate the way through the escape sequence. I won't spoil it here. - The UI feels clunky and text heavy. Everything seemingly going through a PDA is cumbersome. Inventory, Research Tree, and I don't remember what else. - Starting a new game takes way too long to get into the action. It feels like a solid minute of waiting before I can do anything. -Update: I timed it. It's about 1 minute. Please let us look around so it feels like we still have *some* control. Use the panel we look at for the landing sequence to help us pass the time better. - All actions have a corresponding animation that must play out completely before the action is considered done. ie: picking up items and putting things away. Let the animation play out, sure, but don't restrict the movement of the player. Overall, I like what the game is trying to be - environmental simulation where it's your survival against mars. However, there's still a lot of UI barriers, animation dependency fixes, and QOL updates that need to happen before I can recommend this game to others. at 50% off, let alone full price. UPDATE: I've added to my review as I've spent more time in the game and found some things I thought were missing. It's definitely a game that requires knowledge, and you need to read the tutorials. Seriously. Read the tutorials. Thank you to the developers in responding to my initial 2-hour playtest feedback (steam refund policy). I will keep playing and add additional info as I spend more time with the game.

This could be a great game, but IT'S BUGGY AS HECK. Playing the sandbox, four starts and I have yet to be able to build the first base. I always come up short of components, mostly small and medium circuit boards. You have to salvage then. There is a recipe in the printer for them but they can't be printed. I've salvaged EVERYTHING, and no circuit boards to be found. What I can't understand is that I hear posts of folks who have got past this, and thread about circuit boards never mention the supply shortage. Is there some game mechanic I'm missing? I would write more but I have not been able to play enough to have an opinion.

This game may or may not be an asset flip. I cannot say for sure but it sure feels like one. This game leaves the player more lost than a blind man during a shootout. No idea what to do, the mission briefings dont really say anything (at one point, the mission prompt would literally say "no translation available"). UI and menu navigation is a complete hell. Mining is an extremelly tedious activity and makes no much sense at all. You have to drill a rock twice (?) to get wathever the content of it may or may not bet (you do not know what it will be, so it is literally a russian roulette). Apparently there is no iron on mars either... I didnt wasted my time further with this game. It may or may not be fun in co-op, but i dont feel any kind of motivation to try and sell it to my friends just so i can try the co-op, but by the looks of it, it wont be any better.

tldr: The question I have to ask myself with any game is does it keep me up at night wanting to come back to it? Yes! The game feels like it was released a little too early and should have spent more time in the oven in beta. However, the devs are being very reactive and responsive and racing to fix any issues, much more so than many other EA games (I'm looking at you Osiris!) it also fills a genre gap that few other games can fill, like a more sciency, realistic version of The Planet Crafter Bugs: 3/5 The game is buggy for sure. Not as bad as Cyberpunk though. The devs are extremely responsive and working hard to fix the bugs as quickly as possible. Graphics: 3/5 The game looks better than The Planet Crafter which I also really like, but not as pretty as COD6 or the Witcher 3 Gameplay: 5/5 I find the gameplay loop of exploring, building, researching, crafting as very satisfying and rewarding. Solving problems and making your life easier with new technologies really gives you that dopamine hit. Performance: 4/5 The game could use more optimization. Most of the time the performance is great, but when driving a vehicle