Surviving Mars: Relaunched

Even in the original game, when the inexplicably designed systems would break and occasionally result in the deaths of colonists, the title was oxymoronic. In the world of Surviving Mars, Mars is easy to survive. Instead of surface radiation levels 40 times greater than Earth, you land having apparently solved that problem. You are unaffected by the poison perchlorates in the soil or low gravity's effect on the body. Hard feats of engineering and science that would take generations to even dent never seem to tug on your efforts or resources. Social dysfunction is a minor inconvenience at worst. Relaunched takes this all to an extreme, stimulating the slow crawl of intradecade anachronism. The game represents the apotheosis of a certain mid-2010s zero interest rate era optimism about technology and space travel, an unserious and facile aspirationally apolitical cosmism-lite that was utterly obsessed with Mars while ignoring virtually everything about physical, chemical and biological realities. It is a Muskian fantasy, and the game quotes him multiple times, unconvincingly impersonating Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in an attempt to fabricate depth. Realism is, of course, not a requirement for effective art or story, but the decision to eschew it in this case results in a flatness that stunts promise. Each time I play I find myself wishing terraforming would take 10,000 years of actual play time (what a statement that might be). Or that I were in a brutal war against the unkind forces of biology. Yet there is something seductive about playing a reflection of an entire era ("a novel is a mirror carried along a public highway" as Stendhal put it), putting yourself in the shoes of those naive ideologies, even if some of them arguably matured into virulent poisons haunting the global body politic. Paradox, the (hopefully) accidental high priests of developing game systems in ostensibly ideological and historical games that warp the perception of politics and social structures in unrealistic ways, in this case publishes such an attempt here. Relaunched is an attempt at redemption for a product that did not return on investment. When Charles II ascended to the throne of England in 1660, theatre had been banned for 18 years, exorcised from public life in those "times of humiliation." As the two patented playhouses reopened with the blessings of their new old government, they faced a legal requirement to "peruse all plays that have been formerly written and to expunge all profaneness and scurrility from the same, before they be represented or acted." More importantly they reckoned, almost immediately, with the fact that audiences seemed unhappy and unresponsive to the material. The diarist Samuel Pepys noted in March 1662 that Romeo and Juliet was "the worst that ever I heard in my life." He designated A Midsummer Night's Dream "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life." With alacrity, the playhouses began rewriting Shakespeare and the rest. And not just the hits. They rewrote and fixed apparent mistakes, chasing applause and capital, retooling and staging version after version. This even included drafts of plays that never made the stage, or were failures on release, stuck in development hells. Timon of Athens. Troilus and Cressida. Surviving Mars is not Shakespeare, I confess, but there is something alluring about involving yourself in the quest for redemption of a flawed work. As I write this, the tweaks are still ongoing. The new development team is taking the game and turning it into something else. Revisiting, seeing if they have cracked it, is its own game, an observational bildungsroman. You check in to see if the game will grow up, or stay stunted for eternity. And so, despite the myriad of incomprehensible choices, the nonsensical logic of how domes and passages function, not to mention the bizarrely narrow options of employment and production and the absence of genuine economic modeling of any configuration, I found myself seduced by the hidden threads of what could have been. I stomached the childlike ideology, and built these Buckminster Fuller-esque protostructures, captivated for long hours before the ennui takes hold. Perhaps I will build and try again, perhaps I will not, and you will have to wait and see if it can be redeemed, and if that even matters.

played hoping things were fixed, they're not, cant destroy train tracks, wont work through tunnels, I could just work round it but wish I'd never bought it now, very disappointing

Tl;dr: Worth it if this is your first time playing, stick with the first launch if you got all the DLC and stuff before they pulled it from the store. The real review: I recommend this with the caveat that this is worth it if you didn't buy the game before "relaunched." If this is your first go at the game, it's worth $40. Relaunched was/is/will always be a shameless money grab by Paradox. Almost all of the bugs in the original game are still here, making things like trains hit and miss to use. The UI changes were arguably nice and the graphics update is mostly unnoticeable unless you're playing on the highest settings. The gameplay is unchanged, and for those new to the game it is extremely grindy. Between resource management, the time sink of research and scanning, and whatnot, even if you play on the highest speed it will easily take you 100 hours to do a full, 100% difficulty (easy) playthrough.

Plus de 300h sur le premier, + de 75 sur la version Relauched. On ne peut pas dire que je sois totalement déçue de cette V2 de Surviving Mars. La refonte du moteur a quand même fix pas mal de bugs. Mais il est vrai que les performances se sont assez peu améliorés. Dès qu'on arrive avec des cités un peu grandes (1000+), ça lag, freeze. Mais ce n'est pas ça que j'ai à reprocher au jeu. Ce qui m'agace, ce sont ces points : - Toujours pas de late game, une fois la terraformation effectuée, la partie est terminée. - Les ateliers ne servent à rien, il va falloir clarifier cette mécanique. Car à part pour un succès, c'est vraiment inutile. - Le nouveau système qui casse encore plus les mods. Je comprendrais pour un jeu multi, mais pour un jeu solo ? Qu'est-ce qu'on en a à foutre sérieusement ? J'ai voulu avoir un dépôt à 150 et je perds les succès pour ça ??? - Le nouveau système politique est intéressant, mais quand on a des factions qui ont des objectifs communs aux nôtres, on n'arrête pas de se faire gratter le pouvoir sans aucune raison... Ça en devient une souffrance. Au point où je déporte en permanence... - La gestion des colonies souterraine est toujours un enfer. Le sous-terrain n'a aucun intérêt. Cette extension est totalement inutile sur le jeu de base, ça ne change pas ici. - Aucune conséquence à l'indépendance de mars ? Juste 6M à dépenser pour être tranquille ? C'est risible... J'ai acheté le jeu avec le season pass, on verra ce que donnent les prochaines extensions. Mais il va falloir revoir une partie des anciennes mécaniques pour les rendre intéressantes. Il y a un vrai besoin de lategame sur ce jeu. Pas seulement de relancer une gmae à chaque fois. Mon évaluation évoluera sans doute en fonction des mises à jours du jeu. J'en attends beaucoup étant mon jeu favori.

Can't recommend it in the current buggy state. This is not what was promised.

Not really an improvement from original game. Like even tutorials are same with all same issues. Pacing is still a problem. Feature-wise it is not that rich. And patches come out VERY slowly. I regret buying it and advice against buying it.

Surviving Mars: REEEEEEEEEEEEE-launched Everyone Disliked That 1/10

As a veteran of the "original" game (over 1.200 hours), my conclusion is: don't buy this scam of a "relaunch" under any circumstances any time soon. It's certainly a downgrade in most aspects. Even the "Haemimont" label is of little relevance now, since they were bought by paradox. - It runs far worse for far too little of a gain - The "upgraded" graphics look terrible, especially their harsh contrast and awkward lightning - Several old bugs still aren't fixed, but new ones were introduced - The new DLCs are half-baked, at best - There's a background spying mechanism - Only sparse mod support - Awful linux/proton compatibility, no longer any native linux port If you're interested in the game's premise, then get the original game, or wait until this "relaunch" is actually finished, and buy it as a complete pack when it's on sale. Now, you might wonder about the previous low ratings, so let's retell the long story, which paradox would like to hide. Paradox (the publisher) screwed up the original game, and simply abandoned it for 3 years, leaving it in a sorry state. Then, they bought the original dev (Haemimont), and decided to dig up the game's corpse, for money. What followed was a new low, even for paradox. Instead of patching the old game, or moving on to a sequel, they released a (paid patch) "relaunch". Any criticism from the fans was completely ignored, and the most vocal opponents were simply perma-banned. But paradox didn't stop at it being merely a "paid patch", oh no. The "relaunch" was actually intended as a launch platform for the usual paradox-style DLC hell, with all the stuff which paradox is infamous for ( like a preorder-bonus DLC for a season pass). Of course, the cash-grab nature of the relaunch was revealed instantly. After the release, the game was barely playable due to being terribly bugged, failing even on the "paid patch" promise. Only now can the game be considered halfway playable, at least until the new patch version introduced new bugs, and invalidated most mods. The DLCs are also more in the realm of prototypes, so there's little reason to buy them. Long story short, as someone who's known paradox for many years, I can only guess that the game may reach a stable & usable state in about two to three years. So, my advice is, don't be tempted by this freebie, just wait until then.