I want very badly to like this game. It's a fascinating terraforming journey, with challenging logistical issues, long-term planning, complex interplay of mechanics, and the pleasure of watching Mars turn from a frozen airless wasteland into a verdant world. It's also a coming-of-age story of a cybernetic intelligence doing the best she can, despite her mission and existence becoming political almost as soon as she booted up.

Unfortunately, these experiences are ruined by a pair of game-breaking transport bugs and a painful and easily fixable quality-of-life issue involving storage, which are still unfixed over a year after I reported them despite a much-touted anniversary bugfix update, as well as a host of minor QoL issues. There are also some missed opportunities with story-gameplay interaction, but the transport bugs and storage headache are the real problems.

If you do go ahead and buy this game, you need to keep a paranoid eye on your construction projects to make sure progress is actually being made on them. Also, be sure to get the Blue Mars dlc as well as the base game, as many resources will be lost to you without it.

Until this game can be relied on to actually build what you order built, I can't recommend it.

An exciting economic strategy game with a pleasant gameplay.
The game evokes associations with dreams of the future and colonization of Mars, as in the 1990 film" Total Recall".
Main save - before plot selection to see all three endings.
Simple and pleasant achievement system.

The AI for the worker drones in this game are MIND NUMBINGLY stupid. They will literally do anything EXCEPT what you tell them to do. I ended up in a situation where the worker bots refused to make more worker bots, and since they die from wear and tear they quickly started dying off. I found myself down to my very last worker drone, which still won't build more workers despite be constantly putting priority on building worker drones and turning off half of the base to get it to do what I want.

This has been a problem since launch and the developers STILL haven't fixed this issue. Don't waste you time and money on this game. It sucks