Hands-off preview of the ‘survival city-builder’
Space used to be the place, but in recent years our collective focus has narrowed to Mars. It’s likely that enough teens stricken with the millennium bug spent the year 2000 exchanging heavy pets in suburban movie theatres, subliminally associating their raging teen hormones withRed PlanetandMission to Mars. Now we’ve gone so far as to send a robot there and treat it like aWALL-Esequel.
Surviving Mars(PC, PS4, Xbox One) is a “deep city building game that takes place on the planet Mars.” It’s being developed by Haemimont Games ofTropicofame and was announced last week by publisher Paradox, the lone new game revealed at Paradox Con 2017 (though the news thatCivilization Vlead designer Jon Shafer is joining Paradox Development Studio might mean the developer/publisher has more up its sleeve).
We were shown an early build-out that included cute little drones milling about (with headlights when it gets dark), darting between arrays of solar panels, wind turbines (for continued energy production at night) and what looked like a combine, but for harvesting concrete. Early stuff. I’m not sure about the combine, but the tech in the game is meant to be based on current, actual research and reasonable extrapolations of things science is doing at the moment, though I imagine there will be some leeway.
Fast forward and we have our first dome, filled with people. There’s even a (space) bar. Once you start getting people out there, humans can start researching the environment and advancing technology more quickly. But there’s no guarantee of a working society — or even getting to that phase.
“you may fail. It’s a survival city-builder.” It’s even in the name! All your colonists are named, have jobs, and can be tracked. Haemimont promises “thousands of individual actors” running in the simulation, even on consoles. And these actors can go rogue. If their comfort level drops too low (maybe a deep chill freezes everyone’s water supply for a bit too long), they may take the next rocket back to earth. If their morale declines, they may even commit (space) crimes. Colonists have different traits, too, and as you add colonies, long-range transportation in between may change the character of each dome. You’re even allowed to screen for specific traits of invitees, though I’m not sure if getting to the procreation stage will ruin your perfect space societies of dutiful workers when they give birth to entitled millenials. I’m sure you can ship the problem offspring off to some kind of camp, or something. After all, “the government is you,” we’re told.
I’m not sure I will even be able to build a functioning society on Mars let alone reach the end goal of fully-automated luxury gay space communism, butSurviving Marsis a sandbox that is looking to give you the tools to succeed, provided we all survive 2017.
