The Basics:
As an aspiring Mars colonist, you will need to use your survival know how to salvage, build, mine and grow to survive daily in the harsh environment. Salvaging wrecked and abandoned bases for parts and materials. Building your own base out of an expanding list of hubs and modules. Whether drilling by hand, or by unlocking and building the Rover, you’ll get to mine the surface of Mars and grow veggies and other plants to turn the red planet slightly greener. All whilst monitoring and managing your power grid, oxygen supply and water network.
A tornado on Mars is an unpleasant experience, watch out for rocks being thrown at you, and being sucked up and thrown out again!
If that wasn’t enough to contend with – the weather on Mars seems to have taken a turn for the worst, with giant dust storms, tornados and dust devils blotting out the sun and covering your precious solar arrays in thick red dust. Not to mention the threat of radiation from solar storms, and being pummelled to death by fiery meteorites.
You've also landed with only the most basic knowledge under your belt, you’ll need to scavenge the plans and blueprints necessary from previous colonies to build the more advanced technology, so don’t plan on staying entirely in the same place for too long, you will be forced to explore the dangerous barren landscape soon enough.
My First Impressions:
I played the campaign mode running on the highest graphic settings (I use a NIVIDA RTX 3070) and the landscape is really stunning, it certainly gives you the Mars experience. The characterisation and personalisation options of your survivor, however, are very limited, with only basic facial and hair modelling available so far. Hopefully this will expand as the game progresses through Early Access.
After the loading screen you’ll land in a very SpaceX Starship inspired rocket at the Alpha Base, a large complex of structures supporting humanity’s dual planet ambitions. You will get to meet the Governor and your base mates, before resting and getting ready to start your shift as an engineer. It all sounds very exciting… but things rarely go to plan on Mars.
I do not want to spoil all the surprises, but I will say never in all my years of gaming have I felt as much panic and as much confusion during a prologue. It’s quite the introduction to the survival aspect of the game, that’s for sure!
A view of the greenhouse, a module used to grow those veggies you'll need to survive.
The game mechanics are simple enough to grasp, you essentially build a base from scratch, working out a power, water and food supply. The tutorials however are not as expansive as I would have liked. I spent a lot of time trying to find out how to make “soil” for example
Whilst I referenced both Stationeers and Satisfactory at the beginning of my review as games in the same genre, let me be clear that Occupy Mars is nowhere near as technical at Stationeers, you will not need to worry about creating the right gas mix to make breathable atmosphere, and you won’t need to worry about gas or liquid pressures either. Having said that, Occupy Mars isn’t as simple a Satisfactory either, you can’t just throw things down and connect them up, planning will be needed and if you over stretch your power supply – you might find you’ll freeze to death pretty quick.
Once you get the technology, building your own Rover to explore and mine is a must in this game.
The Grind:
There are two grindy mechanics in this game, the hunt for abandoned PDA tablets which contain blueprints (which you will need to advance your technology) and scavenging different sizes of circuit boards which you will need to build anything much, especially your power and water networks. You cannot make circuit boards from scratch, they must be found. The grind comes from having to leave your base to visit other old long abandoned bases – all the time whilst clockwatching carefully so you don’t freeze to death after sundown. Whilst there are plenty of bases out there to scavenge from, they are all a similar design and therefore soon lose their novelty. You will also discover how annoying it is to open unpowered airlock doors, over and over again.
There is no “downtime” or leisure time so to speak, you can only fast forward time by sleeping, so if you are sitting there waiting for some crops to grow, there isn’t much you can do beyond having a quick nap.
Despite the grind, I did find the game fun, and I enjoyed the challenge – but now at over 70 hours with my main base built, I am scratching around trying to find things to do. Hopefully more “quality of life” options will be added once the game gets beyond Early Access.
Notable Bugs:
This game is Early Access on Steam, and as normal there are plenty of bugs to contend with, some of them are very annoying.
Whether its items glitching through the floor, the loss of oxygen when changing base layout, or your Rover grabber suddenly no longer working, these kinds of bugs, whilst annoying, can all be sorted with a quick load of your most recent quick save. But that does mean you are dragged out of your immersion, which is not ideal.
Also the game can crash entirely when switching between your remote control drones and your wrist computer, which without a save in between, can be very costly to your progress.
More serious is the obvious memory leak which means the longer you play the more the world map starts loading in random structures you long since tore down. There are also very jerky loading transitions when travelling across the surface as new chunks are loaded in. There is also a rather interesting bug which tells you there is plenty of Oxygen outside your suit... my advice, don't take your helmet off to check... How much these kinds of bugs annoy you and detract from your gaming experience will depend upon your own tolerance for bugs and Early Access growing pains, personally they aren’t a huge problem for me – just remember to quick save often.
Old friends can be found out there in the dust... including this little blast from the past, the Pathfinder Rover.
Would I recommend Occupy Mars?
Yes – but I would reiterate that as this game is in Early Access, if you want a perfect game experience, leave it a while, and let the very active development team iron out the wrinkles. There is an Occupy Mars limited demo however which might be a good idea if you want to get a feel for the game mechanics etc.
My game rating.
In its current form I would give this a solid 6 out of 10. There is plenty to see and do initially, it gives you the Mars feeling from the realistic map, named landmarks and realistic night sky (which is pretty breath-taking). There is still much for the developers to work on however, so it isn’t anywhere near perfect yet.
Technical details (taken from the Steam Store)
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i5-6400 / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: RX 570 4GB VRAM / GeForce GTX 970 4GB VRAM
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 15 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX compatible
Additional Notes: System requirements may change during the development of the game
The beautiful night sky of Mars, lit up by a deadly Solar Storm.
WRITTEN BY WoorLord
EDITED BY Solace
IMAGES Sourced from Occupy Mars (Version 0.120.1.1) taken by WoorLord - Occupymarsgame.com
