Per Aspera

The AI for the worker drones in this game are MIND NUMBINGLY stupid. They will literally do anything EXCEPT what you tell them to do. I ended up in a situation where the worker bots refused to make more worker bots, and since they die from wear and tear they quickly started dying off. I found myself down to my very last worker drone, which still won't build more workers despite be constantly putting priority on building worker drones and turning off half of the base to get it to do what I want. This has been a problem since launch and the developers STILL haven't fixed this issue. Don't waste you time and money on this game. It sucks

I want to love per Aspera so much. At the first glance this looks like a decent logistic puzzler. The longer you play it, the more the absolutely infuriating, lazy implemented design gets to you. [hr][/hr] [h2]Game mechanics - In Order of magnitude my grieveances with the game:[/h2] - Logistic is absoluty broken. I have watched so many materials which preferred to be delivered via the slowest road instead of the hyperloop network... I have watched so many materials which instead to the factory next to a mine which needed an item from the mine was instead served by a far away warehouse, instead of from the mine... I have watched in AGONY the absolutely horrific deconstruction system in action which forces you to micromanage even the most simple deconstruction actions. - No proper prediction of the rising water level. Combined with absolutely slow deconstruction of buildings, this will lead to a frustrating construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of your water pumps, ports, shipyards. Atrocious! - Did I mention the poorly implemented logistics? There is not a button or command to tell your network to drain a mine as soon as it has any output. Instead you have to rely on an absolutely arcane and obscure ruleset that deals with ratios and when to pull what next from the store or a mine any given mine. - The ports act as a warehouse. So imagine, without realizing it, that your warehouse sitting RIGHT ON THE SHORES, next to the rising waterlevels, with hundreds, nay, thousands of items, being flooded. Just why? Why not simply implement a new harbour/Quay which does not have a warehouse? Just why? This game can be pain. [h2] Progressing through the game [/h2] At the first playthrough it is bearable. At any subsequent playthrough it feels there are way too many artificial limiters in the game, such as research being super slow, congested networks with barely any means around it and believe me: I tried decentralizing my base etc, This results in you being AFK and letting the game running at 16X speed for a lot of time. - Combat: Oh my god. Clearly, it was designed to be in, but no one had the time, enthusiasm or spirit to implement it in an enjoyable way. This feature should have been cut, including the entire military research tree. [h2] UI[/h2] Lacking... severely lacking in enabling you to properly manage your base. [h2] Story [/h2] - Go play the Sandbox campaign and skip the story. The narrative in this game is atrocious and AMI (you/the protagonist AI) is the most lobotomized character in the history of written characters, right next to Subnautica 2's protagonist. For a "smart" AI, it poses questions that are absolutely trivial and do not reflect the psychological development of an intelligent mind. Also the "dialogue options" being presented seemingly do not match up with the spoken lines afterwards. VERY frustrating. In addition there is a lack of options you actively can chose / participate in OR actively refuse, [spoiler]such as attacking the other colony[/spoiler], making it a terrible choice. A much more linear story would have benefited this game and the scope of it just fails this game in the narrative department [h2] Music [/h2] I dislike it, with the few exceptions. [h2]Rating: [/h2] 4-5/10 - go get it on a sale and play factorio instead. The entire game, even years after release, feels unfinished. The developer clearly lacks experience with games of this type, seeing as there is a clear lack of options to satisfy the needs of a logistics challenge gamer. On the positive side: If you mute this game and play much better fitting soundtracks, the game ALMOST does a good job of capturing the feeling of colonizing Mars. And Doctor Foster's voice actor? Oh my god. I am not gay, but his voice alone makes me struggle with my sexuality. I would still take a look at per aspera 2, but the first entry is rather a learning experience.

Really interesting. Great visuals. Story starts off enjoyable (mostly just due to Troy Baker). Love the theory behind terraforming mars. The changing landscape as mars becomes slowly flooded, ice mining turns into water... pumping... it's easy to see how this could have been a great game. Sadly, both the mechanics and story fall long before the game ends. Not only is the story inane and predictable, but you hear less and less from Troy Baker as the game goes on. Repeatedly, the game only has dialogue that assumes you 'failed' a particular challenge here and there, no matter how well you crushed it. There are actual plot points because of this. And the mechanics? Repetitive to the point of failure. Games with simple mechanics can go far if they're consistently fun, but this game has three actions in a trenchcoat. 1. Place a worker hub, power source, maintenance hub. Repeat as needed (wherever the game tells you "no power" or "no maintenance" or "high congestion". 2. Build mines. Every resource you can touch, mine it. 3. Research tech. This should be interesting, at least thematically, but after the first few layers the tech tree becomes "aerobrake an asteroid with X chemical instead of Y chemical" or "Make factories work faster, but no more efficiently, at the cost of resources". At no point was it useful for me to build a tier 2/3 factory, and my mines were only built at the lowest possible level for that depth. The game really wants to be taken seriously. It has many tabs for resource management, viewing different temperatures, biomes, congestion - a lot of which I really like. Individual resource graphs, including both maximum and current supply and demand, and alerts whenever you need to build more of any specific building. But most of it... doesn't have much use. If you don't have enough raw materials to supply your factories, you just keep expanding. More raw materials. Rarely did I need to build more factories. And despite the UI and visuals, some issues were almost impossible to diagnose. Mines should only "stop" mining if they run out of resources, lose power, or their storage "fills up". Many times in the game my "current production" would be significantly lower than my "maximum production", despite manually verifying all of these were not issues. And clicking on a resource opens a graph, but doesn't select (or highlight) all of the relevant buildings? So many good overlays and they didn't include one of the most important ones. And the end-game takes absolutely forever, which would be fine if there were interesting things to do, but it's still just the same - Steps 1-3, rinse and repeat. Great job voice actors, and good try by the dev team. Genuinely interesting game with good implementation ideas, that just... falls apart by the seams.

Pretty unique survival strategy similar to Surviving Mars, though far better execution in my opinion. The terraforming feels very rewarding and I like the story elements, havent seen those in other building games. (Playing with Blue Mars)

Great space city builder/Management game! Very chill to play. - Space theme! Not many games have this kind of theme. - Cool story but some of them have quite bad timing. - No bugs so far, I haven't seen any. - Have a lot of buildings to build. - Fun gameplay and good mechanics. - Good presentation and have a voice acting. - QOL could be better, but it is forgivable. - Quite short for this kind of game.

Limited replayability, logistics is not well designed, the combat is extremely shallow, meteors are a constant nuisance and the game does not give you any indication that they have destroyed a building. Would not recommend. You'll get a few hours of entertainment, but that's about it. Go play Surviving Mars.

I really love this game, especially the planet-wide scale. But unfortunately it tries to be something it is clearly not while failing to deliver the things it suppose to, which is why I have to give it a negative review. 1. It's a colony simulator but on a planet-wide scale, yet there is a building limit which needs to be increased via research. Otherwise it's impossible to expand your base beyond that. Aren't we suppose to eventually cover the whole surface of Mars? Why put a limitation on this then? 2. The game is supposedly about managing planet-wide logistics, but we are not allowed to manually build the roads (games does it for you laying the roads between factories in the most confusing and pointless way) nor we are allowed to manually set up logistics routes for our drones. The result is for any sizable base is constant chaos where resources travel anywhere besides where they are needed. Why not letting the player decide? 3. Colonists are useless beyond generating research points, which kinda makes the idea of terraforming Mars rather pointless. There's absolutely no need to grow the number of colonists besides finishing your research tree faster. How cool it would be if colonists could give you some random quests: to build a new outpost or a road, or asked you what type of government they want to establish etc. So much potential is simply lost here. 4. Research tree is rather disappointing. It is small but takes forever to research. Most of the technologies are just +50% to efficiency of something we already have, no new materials or goods for colonists to use, no new types of vehicles or modes to transport resources (railroads? airplanes?) just upgrades to increase the efficiency which kinda not needed because your biggest problem will be not the lack of resources but broken logistics. 5. Orbital layer is mostly useless, it's just a place to select a project for your spaceports to work on. Why can't it be used as extra map layer allowing you to maybe launch a geological satellite that maps resources faster than areology station or maybe set up a communication satellite (per colonist request) which improves the quality of life in the colony? Nothing like that is in the game unfortunately. Now there's unfortunately absolutely boring combat mode, which could (and should) be removed from the game. There's weird and cheesy main campaign plot going deep in psychology and philosophy of AI rather than social impacts of building a human colony on another world. And there's also a broken automated logistical system for the 99% of the gameplay So yeah....

I have came to this game 3 times, Itching for some space building game. Thinking to myself it was not THAT bad last time right ? Getting bored and not finishing either of my saves with no will to continue. I love the visuals, the concept, the gameplay. But it is ... too sluggish ? 16x speed up still not enough sometimes.