City builders, I’ll never get away from the damn things. In the past few weeks, I’ve reviewed Tropico 6, which is more about pleasing outside forces than your people; and Frostpunk which is about forcing children in jobs they might die in. Both of those reviews were on consoles, and both now feel like I’ve been cheating on PC ports of city builders. I say that, but it was Paradox Interactive’s Cities Skylines that more recently put me off the idea of city builders on the Xbox One and PS4.

This week’s free game on the Epic Games store, however, is Paradox Interactive’s more recent colony builder, Surviving Mars. A game about, unsurprisingly, colonizing mars; Something that weirdo Elon Musk wants to do with suspicious speed, almost as if he knows more than some others. However, it is the sci-fi trope of colonization number one, the namesake for one David Bowie song, and one of the worst endings to a tv show in history (thanks America!).

So what’s Surviving Mars then? Well, it is the usual city-building nonsense of keeping people happy with the power, water, and jobs they need to survive. Nonetheless, it is less about them and more about setting up the infrastructure of your Mars habitat. The early game, from only a few hours of playing, is solely based around setting up facilities to power rovers, refuel the ships, and mine building materials. As this summary suggests, you’ll spend a lot of time not colonizing mars, just digging it. If there was a way of the British to set up base on mars, they would have robots enslaving little green men to mine for them.

With that, when you finally have people to establish “Life on Mars,” if you excuse the reference, they need the basic amenities to advance their little colony. In the beginning, I suggest doing the sane thing and prioritize specialists. Get some botanists to poo on potatoes, engineers to do what they do; and scientists to look at a piece of paper for six months, hum, and decide they need six more months of research to complete things. That said, the in-game time feels a little slow when constructing and you’ll want to stay on the third speed. Then it feels too fast for a ship’s arrival, research completing, and things that take several days or months.

Nonetheless, I don’t think I could give a proper analysis of Surviving Mars without a botanist, two engineers, an officer to act like they know what’s going on, and several scientists to figure out what had gone on several months before I started playing. In a fully uninformed opinion, I think with several hours to play and a technical manual, Surviving Mars is a fine game. However, I don’t think it will be the one for you to say, “this revolutionizes city-builders.”

Surviving Mars is available for free, with some DLC you’ll have to pick up yourself, on the Epic Games store right now. This offer ends on the 17th of October, where we’ll finally be getting into the horror of October, some games I’m already not particularly a fan of. Yes, next week we do this double bill nonsense again with Observer and Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. Both will be available from the 17th through to the 24th, and both are about as interesting to me as dishwater that’s been defecated into.

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