Terraformers (PC) - Preview

I was supposed to have this preview done in late April. When I first sat down to give developer Asteroid Lab and publishers Goblinz Publishing and IndieArk’s Terraformers a whirl around the red planet, it didn’t go to plan. The trouble was it crashed very quickly while booting up. Of course, Terraformers is currently in early access, so I said to myself that I’d give it a day or so to update and I’d return. It is now August, and I’ve finally got the time to properly sit down to give it my time, not only to understand it but to calmly deal with a few hiccups.

Terraformers is a city-builder akin to Surviving Mars, though, with a slight difference. It is a turn-based Rogue-lite, a rather strange twist on the formula that is known for Cities: Skylines, SimCity 3000, Frostpunk, and others of that real-time ilk. Still retaining that strategy element of the turn-based focus, you spend your time working out what will get you the most amount of resources, where you should explore, how to keep people happy, and eventually terraform the planet. In the basic sense, there is a lot to unpack since lots of systems feed into each other here.

The primary system among them all is the leader, the facsimile for the player who will explore and bring specific traits to the group during their time. Mars might be a dusty barren hell, but it does at least have some kind of government/leadership that will step down willingly. Every few years (a good few turns), you replace your explorer of many magnificent wonders with a bloke that wears a suit and will turn the heating up a bit so we can ruin Mars as well as Earth.

Eventually, you’ll realize they all do the same thing but with minor perks or disadvantages to your objective at the time. For example, the businessman that will “help” with global warming to terraform Mars will be able to extract an extra few resources from your mines. This gives you the resources that you need but will reduce the happiness of the colonists. Their mood is a ticking clock. To begin with, the colonists will be happy with the fundamental conditions to live. After a while, they will demand more such as entertainment, hospitals, and courtrooms. Not being placed next to power sources will generally make them happy.

The ultimate goal is to acquire victory points. These are obtained by completing objectives, keeping everyone happy, expanding the colony’s reach, and ultimately terraforming Mars. Now and then, events will come up, such as a sandstorm making it problematic to explore, researchers offering options, Earth handing over some tech to help, or even private companies offering assistance to get specific resources for some good PR. As a contraction of the overview of the game’s systems, that is generally how it all comes together.

Each turn you’ll have to pick a new card (a building) for the colonies, a spreader for the terraforming, or larger resource buildings for outside the city. All of these options take specific resources to build. This is where I think learning the game will take a few rounds to fully comprehend. To begin with, trying to balance resources can be challenging. Very little of Terraformers is impossible to understand, but by the time you’ve realized a mistake has been made, you’ll be three of four turns ahead. There is a small button to revert some decisions immediately after you’ve made them, though you have to be conscious of that at the time.

Once you get into the game properly, you are faced with scenarios that offer varying degrees of challenge including your goals or pushback from the people and environment. For example, in Terraformers sandbox mode, you can make it so your people demand utopia and the environment is committing seppuku because some idiot in a suit and hair plugs decided that turning the “Red Planet” green was a great idea. Equally, you could set the game up to be endless with no expectations so that the climate isn’t looking to choke itself to death with forest fires.

It is refreshing to see a game with this many systems at play not railroad you into doing the tutorial. However, it will gently push you through it to that 300 victory point mark. The reason this is so refreshing is the fact that, unlike other strategy games that want to explain their systems in detail through typical gaming terminology and the game’s story, Terraformers lets you be hands-on. There is a confidence/stupidity in that, as I could just as easily break the game as I would learn the systems.

I know it seems like I talk about this all the time, but those types of tutorials help people like me in particular. It could be dyslexia or something undiagnosed that causes this issue. However, providing me with that way of learning gave me the time to play with systems and understand them a little more. Learning through repetition, and being able to combine those mechanics at my own pace goes a long way. As a tradeoff, the tutorial trundled along at a more uneventful pace than I think may have been required to be exciting. Regardless, in the end, it did result in understanding how to win even with my stupid mistakes getting in the way.

The aforementioned hiccups came, however, from things I don’t fully comprehend. A complete freeze necessitated a forced closure of Terraformers, an error code called on my attention after clicking a button I previously pressed with no other issues, and there were personal things I’ll get to in a second. Terraformers is currently in early access, so I am a lot more forgiving of these situations, but I’d like to understand why so I can at least describe them more sufficiently. Not that any of these cases were all that frequent, though they were pronounced when they did make an appearance.

The superficial gripes emanate from an options menu that is much like the red planet itself, barren. There are audio sliders, a windowed mode and resolution drop menu, something for mouse sensitivity and zoom speeds, an option to reverse the zoom, language, and an interface scaler that (in my experience) doesn’t do much. With windows that pop up containing a paragraph or two of text (rather small text at that), it feels like something could have been done here to make that easier on those that prefer larger font sizes. I’m not asking for full-dyslexia filters, something large enough to read while lounging back is nice.

I can’t say I am disappointed with Terraformers. Unlike most relatively low-profile early access releases, there is an idea in place and a solid game to enjoy. As a game to take your time with, Terraformers isn’t going to have you apprehensively on the edge of your seat like you are captaining a ship in FTL or dictating in Frostpunk. By the time you’ve realized you’ve sent the Martian colony on a downward spiral, you’ll be too deep trying to recover any chance of staying long enough to take the helmet off without the threat of gunpoint.

Ultimately, Terraformers has a solid base establishing itself among more recognizable names in my city-building game library. Currently, it lacks that same raw excitement to return regularly, since what is there repeats rather quickly. With beautiful art that we’ll be calling “early 21st-century retro-futurism” by the time we’re blasting off to the Martian colony, Terraformers is endlessly inviting with explosions of color and life from the Petri dish to plants and animals. Hiccups in early access as well as the repetition may take the game off of some people’s lists, but I’m interested to see where Asteroid Lab takes Terraformers when it releases fully.

A PC copy of Terraformers was provided by Goblinz Publishing for the purposes of this preview.