Survival games are some of my favorite types of games, wether it’s a story based game with survival elements, or just a full on survival game where you’re given no objectives, I love them. So when Mars Alive appeared on Kickstarter, I was interested in it. Especially when I heard it was being published by Winking Entertainment, a company I’ve grown to like after their past few PSVR releases. So, is Mars Alive any good?
Mars Alive is a PSVR story based survival game that has your character waking up on Mars, after seeing some strange things happen in a cutscene before then. The story is about figuring out what happened to your crew, and how to survive on Mars. But I won’t go into any more details to avoid spoiling the game.
The game is mission based, you’ll be given a mission and you won’t be able to do another mission until you complete the first one. Most of them are pretty basic tasks, like getting to one side of the map, or obtaining a specific item. The difficulty comes more in the survival aspects.
The gameplay has a few different survival elements in it. These include food, water, temperature, energy, oxygen, and health. You’ll have to collect a wide variety of items to keep these bars up. If you do die you can press to continue to load from the most recent automatic save, or you can press load to choose from several different save points.
A big part of the game is collecting items and crafting. You can craft batteries, better food products, upgrades, ingots, and a lot more. You can craft items by using a 3D printer, which can be found inside one of your bases. I would have preferred if you could craft inside of your inventory though, because I found myself going back and forward when I needed to craft something, and I usually wasn’t anywhere near the 3D printer.
But, shortly into the game you unlock a rover which can help you move around faster. Your character moves at a pretty low speed, so I was excited once I got the rover. The rover is cool to drive, and helps you move a lot faster. But sadly it’s battery runs out extremely fast, and it can only recharge when the sun is out. But even when the sun is out, it charges very slowly. And because of those reasons, it ended up making the rover more of an inconvenience than a help.
My problems with Mars Alive come with the survival aspects and speed of the game. The world of Mars Alive is really big, and with that comes some problems. It is way too easy to get stuck in a death loop because of lack of supplies, and then you’ll be forced to reload from an older save. This is mainly due to the survival system and movement speed, l thought that the survival aspects were way too harsh on you. The bars you need to keep up to survive can run out really fast and so you’ll be spending most of your time running around looking for items. This might not be the case for all players, but it was for me. To make this game more enjoyable, I think there needs to be an option to reduce the intensity of the survival aspects, and make it where you can craft items in your inventory. There should also be an option to turn on smooth turning, because currently there is only click turning.
So overall, Mars Alive is ok. I was enjoying the game at the beginning, but the game just wasn’t exciting enough or easy enough to keep my playing till the end. For 90% of the game I was just walking around trying to get to the next mission, but was failing due to my rover dying, and my health running low. The graphics and music are great, but I just didn’t enjoy the gameplay. I’d love to revisit it after a few patches, but at it’s current state, it’s just not fun enough for me.
