Surviving Mars

Having a background playing Banished, it really helped with the learning curve.
There is lots to do on this little red planet in so little time.
For those considering purchasing this game, this word soup is for you:
The first epidemic you'll face is the age of lazy welfare sucking seniors. Non-contributing members of the harsh Martian colonisation effort. In this game, seniors do not work; ergo, they do not contribute to the efforts. They leech your resources, and take up valuable real estate that could otherwise be occupied by fertile, sexy, rizzed up Martians. Let me save you hours of time and a few re-do's: I realised that suffocating the seniors in their own dome was so much easier, more efficient, economically friendly, and ultimately (after like 5 failed attempts) sent me into a rapture of satisfaction; feeding them and supplying them with housing, water, food, and oxygen became an option - Finally! this game started to really open up for me! *wipes evil tear*
I mean....You could go the slightly less extreme route and actually feed them, and keep them alive (yawn). But ultimately, you'll want to isolate the seniors in their own domes and keep them away from your valuable housing vacancies in your working domes so your vigorous, youthful Martians can get to slappin' cheeks! ;)
The second epidemic you'll face will be resource management. You will probably learn how to deal with this issue long before your seniors start terrorising your casino's on bingo nights. But keep in mind that resources like water never stop extracting, so managing how much you pull out of the ground versus what you can store and save versus what you cyclically use should contrast with when to turn your factories and machines on and off to save valuable power and resources. This becomes especially important as you scale the difficulties and select landing sites on Mars that are more resource scarce than other locations. (Helpful tip for beginners: If you want the most resource rich location on Mars to start your first colony, use coordinates 4S112E at the selection screen)
I recommend you max out research in your Physics, Engineering, Biotech, Social, and Robotics trees BEFORE you invest any Science into the Terraforming, or Recon & Expansion trees. UNLESS your plan is to mine asteroids, or delve into the underground early, then maybe dump some brainpower into Recon & Expansion. Terraforming is late game grunt work, I wouldn't worry about this until your colony has stabilised a little bit and you've got a comfortable groove set in.
On the topic of Science. OUTSOURCE!!!! this is the best use of your capital. The better tech you get the easier the game becomes. Use your money to outsource whenever you have the funds. The early techs are as inexpensive as 1000 Science each, but the late game techs are tens of thousands of Science per selection; be wise with how you spend this currency, it costs time, not just science. Establishing a solid foundation for research is fundamental to developing a successful colony. Research labs, and Hawking Institutes will form the bulk of your Science department for most of the game, however if you're struggling early on getting science, it might be worth it to dip your toes into the Recon & Expansion tree to get the Recon Centres - They can seek out discoveries in the cosmos (as well as discover resource rich asteroids) to give you a couple thousand extra science from time to time.
Be very picky of your first 12 founding colonists. Don't accept mediocre. You want the Sexy, and Workaholic traits if you can get them, and get an even number of males to females (obviously). Your Earthling Martians need to be Hard working and DTF!!!! The idea is to get off the proverbial nipple, and build a regenerative colony. And NOTHING regenerates like sexy, hardworking Space Cowboys! Yeehaw!
Use the time selection to your advantage. Being able to pause and speed up the game is extremely useful when trying to manage the clock. Your spacebar is your friend!
Build domes that work for your colony and you. I know it sounds like a great idea, but don't build the "Las Vegas Dome" where all your colonists can just go kick it and have a fun weekend. Outfitting it with a few casino's, a wonderful place where your colonists can go watch the rocket launches, and get f'd up at the Space Bar during the all day cocktail hours - This is a waste of valuable resources and real estate (go ahead, ask me how I know this). Your colonists are not community college frat boys looking for a good time. They're FORMER community college frat boys looking for a good time, who just so happen to be on a sponsored suicide mission to the Big Dead Red - We need them SHARP and PRODUCTIVE! Bare in mind when assembling the guts of your domes; your essential kit is Housing, Infirmary, Grocery, Diner, and a fountain/pond, you might need an Electronics Store to satisfy some gaming needs that might be a requirement of some colonists, but for the most part this is the bare minimum to maintain sanity to a level that encourages reproduction. I recommend building a separate dome exclusively for the freshly born Martian crotch-goblins and have this outfitted with nursery's, schools, and playgrounds. This will keep the children out of your "fertile" domes
The martian rail lines are very useful for accessing remote areas from your main populous. I use this for getting resources trapped in deplorable areas of the map. I have had issues with salvaging/deleting rail lines and stations in a few games, and in others, they delete just fine. So they're moody - great...
All in all, I like this better than Banished. I wish there was more content in the workshop, but honestly, I don't think the game needs it.
Good luck and Godspeed everyone!

This game is well designed, with countless hours of playtime. It reminds me of old Outpost 2, or what Outpost 2 would have evolved into. The radio stations playing in the background immerse you into what a not-so-distant Martian world could be like.
There are a few bugs still in the game, mostly contained in the Below and Beyond DLC. They are rare, and usually crash the game, but they are still present. The updates of this game have been deafly silent for a few years now.
The game play itself is engaging, keeping you coming back for more. The mechanics of the game work pretty well, even though sometimes the mechanics do not behave as you intend them to.

First things first. Not all DLC for this game are created equal. If you want the most complete Surviving Mars experience, my personal recommendation is to grab the base game and the Green Planet terraforming DLC, as they have the most polish and are arguably the best bang for your buck. My review posted on this page will only go over the base game. Also note that while I own all the DLC, I do feel that Surviving Mars can stand just fine on its own without any DLC at all.
Now, Surviving Mars. With about a dozen different mission sponsors ((think of it as your starting civilization)), scenarios ((called "challenges" in the game)), hundreds of potential landing sites, a handful of plotlines to follow, and many more parameters that you as the player can control going into a playthrough, this game is especially well-balanced towards any playstyle and I feel has a great deal of replayability, something I am always looking for in any game.
I feel this game has a draw for both casual and hardcore gamers alike. It is totally possible to turn off disasters and slowly build your colony at your own relaxed pace over the course of a week or so until you complete the game. Conversely, it is also possible to pick one of the harder mission sponsors in a disaster-prone area and try your best to survive the onslaught of cold waves, meteors and the like. The game is tailored to fit your playstyle, whatever it happens to be, and I feel this adds some longevity to the game, as you can play it differently the next time you come back to it.
Some parameters are more interesting than others, such as Chaos Theory which completely randomizes the tech tree, possibly giving you access to late-game tech early, while simultaneously taking away some more basic functions until later in the game. This was a worthwhile challenge to complete and felt really rewarding at the end of it all. Each playthrough will also have its own collection of "Breakthrough" technologies, most of which you will want to aim towards getting as soon as possible. Most of the Breakthrough techs are massive alterations to the way your game plays, sometimes even entirely changing the way the game operates. In the last run I just completed I still managed to discover a Breakthrough I had never seen before and I had an absolute blast with it.
The game offers multiple plotlines called "Mysteries" that add a primary story for your playthrough to follow. You can choose which mystery you want to play with, turn it off, or randomize it. Random events and other happenings, such as from Planetary Anomalies you can send rockets to investigate, also serve to change things up and make each playthrough unique. I happened to discover a new side-plot just recently that really drew me in with the last playthrough. The writing for the game is especially thoughtful and in an age where I have mostly fallen out of story-based games, it still manages to captivate me.
I seem to grow attached to every colony I build, all of them seem to have their own unique character and charm to them. I enjoy completing each playthrough of this game I start, and even if I end up putting this game back down for months at a time, I am always happy to boot it back up again.
The OST is hands-down one of my favorite game soundtracks of all time. Something about it is just intoxicating and relaxing, focus-sharpening and very much fits into the action of the game itself. The composer really knew what they were doing. I find myself listening to the OST even during periods of time where I'm not actively doing a playthrough or sometimes not even playing games at all. I would purchace a physical CD or vinyl were I ever to stumble across it.
TL;DR Surviving Mars and Green Planet DLC are both 10/10. Surviving Mars can stand on its own just fine, though. Good draw for both casual and hardcore gamers alike depending on playstyle. Great music keeps you going through the challenges, and lots of replayability keeps you coming back again and again to discover more.

This is my favorite game of all time, and I'm surprised not everyone knows about it. It's my secret getaway from the world for real. I tell my friends "I'm going to Mars" and I play it to decompress my life overall.
I'd be happy to get new updates or new DLC for it, but I guess it is not in the agenda of the developers at all.
It would be wonderful to get a Venus or another solar planet version of it too in the future as we learn more about other planets as well.

Fun and relatively simple colony sim that could have used a little more polish.
The good.
-the OST is amazing
-slow paced chill experience
-satisfying tech tree with pretty OP and fun upgrades in the late game.
-excellent progression from pinching penny's and barely filling housing to raking in billions and overpopulation being the main problem in your colony.
-well written story cards and interesting and rewarding “mystery events”.
-very customizable game options and tons of variety in random events and starting settings that can have pretty big impacts on your early and mid game strategies.
-environment design is gorgeous. Still looks great at macro scales in 2025.
-has a lot of character and S O U L. You can tell the devs cared and had fun making this game.
-its overall a really fun game with a lot of replayability if you like slower paced games. The progression is very rewarding and well balanced. Challenging but not unfair. Different challenges and goals present themselves as you progress and watching lakes fill and tundras transition to forests is very satisfying. My complaints are mostly centered on the very late game so don’t let them discourage you from playing this (you should) (and get the Green Mars DLC. It’s vital). Mods also fix most of my gripes.
The bad
-buggy.
-the game ender (in the very late game, don’t worry) is that colonists and drones start having trouble managing themselves. Colonists lose the ability to efficiently distribute themselves and there isn’t an efficient way to do it manually so keeping homelessness and unemployment in check becomes a Sisyphean task. Drones also struggle to build things and will sit idle despite there being ample resources in nearby caches. Sounds like a major problem but this only really becomes an issue in your colony in the very late game. You’ll have forests and thousands of colonists before this really becomes unwieldy. Theres a mod for this that has helped in the past but is out of date as of 4/2025.
-not enough building variety in the late game. Once you are fully teched and self sufficient, you end up just building the same buildings over and over in every dome in order to keep everyone employed. So. Many. TV Stations.
-art design. The domes look great and most of the building designs are nice or at least totally fine. However there’s a few buildings that are so bad they impact the overall aesthetic. The garish Nurseries, playgrounds, and amusement parks are the worst offenders.
-missing some basic UI and control functions that should be standard in a colony sim with rts elements like this. You can’t double click or shift click units to select all similar types, only some units can set up transport routes (dozers can’t automate waste rock transport wtf), you can’t issue complex orders to more than one transport at a time, unless a unit is pinned, it can be very easy to misplace it then all you can do is scan the landscape playing where’s Waldo until you find it, no mini map which would solve a lot of the issues with the camera and losing units, not a great queue or prioritization system for building and giving orders. Mods fix a lot of these issues.
-the camera is odd. It zooms out a fair amount but not as much as I’d like before transitioning to an overhead map that’s on a fixed camera angle. Theres a bit of a delay in this transition and the default scroll speed is pretty slow so scrolling across the map becomes tedious. A mini map would really help this. There is a minimap mod but I haven’t tried it.
-mostly complete slop DLC. I mentioned the OST is excellent, it is. The other radio stations aren’t so don’t bother with any of those. Cosmetics you can take or leave. Get em on sale I guess. I haven’t tried the trains or underground DLCs but from watching YouTube videos I’m not really interested in them or what they add to the game (they’re also buggy as hell apparently). The only totally vital DLC I’d get is the green planet one. This unlocks a whole tech tree and the terraforming mechanics. Honestly should be part of the base game but ya know, devs gotta get their bag. The in dome buildings is also worth it and project laika is fine. The rest is probably not worth it unless in an on-sale bundle with other stuff.
-once you are mostly terraformed, the lighting gets obnoxiously bright and saturated simulating a healthy atmosphere and clear sunny day I guess? I like the idea of a warmer lighting at this point in the game but it was not implemented well and it overexposes things to the point of losing detail in highlights. The nights are also a bit too dark. A mod kind of fixes this but it just preserves the way days looked prior to terraforming so you don’t get a new lighting effect as you progress.
Nitpicky complaints. I give this a 7/10. Worth a play if you’re a genera fan.

This is a 51% recommendation. Surviving Mars is fun around the edges, but the core gameplay isn't well-balanced. For a resource-management, colony-survival game, the interface and user experience is bad -- it's hard to tell where resources are going, how frequently, and how to manage where they go.

Solutions for early game don't scale up well to mid-game or late game. And a ton of time is spent in fast-forward, waiting for things to happen.

Fun enough. But not an especially good version of what it's trying to be. Just okay. But still a Thumbs Up, I guess.

For me this is the best Mars colony building sim. Plenty of structures, everything is well made and engage grey cells. This is kind of strategy that you will hold to for a while and think about how to improve on your last gameplay. Strongly recommended.