Recent reviews by SickBeatz

8/10 Terraforming

As someone who hasn't played a lot of resource management games, but loves sci-fi, I enjoyed this game a lot. The story and visuals are fantastic. I recommend playing this game on the first 2 difficulties. I will explain below.

Why should you play this game?

1. The Story: You are an advanced AI in charge with terraforming Mars. At the start you are a child, dependent, learning, growing. As the game progresses you become more independent and complex. This happens both in a physical sense of expanding your infrastructure and dealing with logistics problems, but also from a mental stand point of critical thinking, questioning the information being presented to you, and making moral decisions

You are often faced with choices that impact the planet and the people. These choices do influence how the terraforming progresses and people's opinion of you.

2. The Atmosphere/Ambiance: I found the visuals and music of the game extremely satisfying. The scale of the changes and the attention to detail is honestly a thing of beauty. I found myself pausing to just LOOK at the changes happening. Zooming in on the shore and seeing the water slowly rise, or the algae/lichen spread. Zooming out to see the planet from space and the shifting areas of brown/green/blue.

What is OK about this game?

The Game Play: The game play loop is mostly find resource, build path to resource, build supply chain to disperse resource. While there is some tech that requires large amounts of resources, most of this goes towards supporting an ever expanding population of colonists in order to research tech faster. This gameplay loop mostly works well, but there are some issues with the worker drones (these perform all your tasks) as things start to scale.

What needs improvement?

Workers Workers Workers: While initially it satisfying to plan your buildings, and designate priorities to the drones, eventually you find yourself building copious amounts of worker hubs, as each hub can only house one worker, and each worker can only carry 1 object or do 1 task at time. Even with max upgraded roads and good positioning I ended up building 628 workers hubs (and my traffic still aint perfect). When you consider I had about 250 farms/mines/factories i.e. things that required resources for workers to move that's kind of nuts. I can easily see people getting turned off the game because of this tedium. *hyperloops are cool but individually transfer only small amounts of stuff at a time*

While you get many upgrades for food/mines/factories/roads, you never get to upgrade the worker hub or workers. It's a shame because the game would honestly look and RUN a lot better without the hundreds of hubs honeycombing everything. Advanced and superior worker hubs that house 2 and 3 workers would be a godsend. Or an upgrade that allows workers to carry +1 or +2 items.


The Priority System: The priority system is a toggle on every building that tells your workers to prioritize tasks related to that building. The problem is that it's either on or off. This means if there are two things you want prioritized the game has its own priorities it will use to decide, and it doesn't show that to the player, but boy will you find out the hard way.

-------Example: I had an area with like 50 mines I wanted to extract resources from in a flood plane, I put storage containers just off the flood plane. These mines produced WAY more than my society currently needed. I noticed the mines were turning off because they reached their limit of ready-to-take product. I check traffic and see all the workers in the area are idle. Essentially because my factories didn't NEED those extra resources they were being left to rot, despite the fact that there were storage containers nearby where the goods could be stored. The workers are literally idle and ignoring the storage where all these resources could be going, leaving the mines halted.

Essentially the storage was useless, until I prioritized it. But guess what, when prioritized, the storage took precedence over EVERY SINGLE OTHER prioritized thing. I didn't notice at first until my worker count started to drop because the worker production had stopped. I watched as every resource in my society is being sent to these storage containers and all active production stopped LOL.

ALSO there's no way to tell your workers to move the resources out of storage. Hundreds of resources in storage on a flood plain? Get ready to wave goodbye at it sinks below the water line O_O :,( Mainly for storage buildings, but this also applies to hyperloops and additional landing sites

It would be nice if priority had a a slider instead of a toggle, say 1-5, where buildings start at 2/5, and the toggle sets them to 3/5. You could then manually set it at 1/5 for like storage (honestly should be default for storage) and other low prio things for workers to do when nothing else is going on. Set work factories and their related stuff at 5 (superseding all else). Maybe allow you to set prio on certain tasks like "road construction" or "worker hub construction" or even just "construction". IMO new construction should be prio by default because late game you essentially auto click prio every time you place one, gets annoying after a couple hundred.

**always pay attention to worker counts, if they start to drop you can be sent into a death spiral as more workers die, the goods necessary to build more become harder and harder to reach the factories**

I do recommend playing on the first 2 difficulties as the tedium with the logistics issues described above only gets worse on the higher difficulties where you will need EVEN more logistics/workers

TLDR 8/10 Solid fun scifi game with some logistics gripes. Don't be afraid to x16 speed, it's there for a reason.

Free, and useful, although I wish the Atmospheric Humidifier covered a bigger area.

10/10 Would pay more than 60$ for a similar experience.

This game is one of those RPGs where you finish segments and have to take a second to collect yourself. It transcends expectations and delivers one of the most compelling stories I have ever experienced in a video game. To speak on some of the most powerful moments in the game would be to spoil the experience for anyone reading this review. If you are a fan of action RPGs, or even just RPGs, or hell even just storytelling... missing out on this game is a tragedy.


P.S. Remember to always save after bosses/cinematics, you WILL get used to PC combat controls and it will feel smooth. PC hacking controls suck but function well enough to get through the game.