The new Mars game is not a City-Builder, it’s a Planet-Builder



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Illustration from the article titled The New Mars Game Is Not A City Builder, It's A Planet Builder

Picture: For Aspera

Per Aspera is a new PC game released this week in which you play as an AI tasked with transforming Mars from a large, cold stone into a place where humans can walk their dogs outside in a leafy park.

It’s a city builder in spirit, in that you build buildings that interact with other buildings and the gradual goal is to make your settlement bigger and bigger. But For Aspera is very in terraforming science, and relies quite heavily on its surroundings (you’re an AI loaded with drone and construction robot loads), and so it’s not really a city builder.

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Picture: For Aspera

Think of a game like Factorio and you might be getting closer to the mark. As you build more and more things and expand to the surface of Mars, your only concerns are extracting resources from the ground and turning them into more things for your expansion, and therefore a lot of things that you would expect from a city builder. – namely, the sandbox element of making everything beautiful and enjoyable – does not really exist here.

Here, optimization is everything. You are a computer in charge of other computers and you have a very big work to do, and a lot of your time is spent making sure that your roads are running as fast as possible, that your factories have enough raw materials, and that you have enough energy and minerals to sell to actually trying to transform the planet, instead of just feeding the endless expansion of your colony.

Which sounds very boring and mathematical, and it can happen sometimes, but boy, For Aspera knows this and compensates in a few key areas.

First, this game has a story! Well, there is also a sandbox mode, but the story campaign is definitely the best option. I’m not going to spoil it, because things get pretty crazy later, but you start the game as a very functional AI with a very clear mission, and as your colony grows and you unlock more tech the things are starting to … change. . With very few people on Mars, at least initially, you are kept company by the constant radio chatter of your coworkers and supervisors, who help tell a story that unfolds the more you play it (and which is of the highest quality, especially Laila Berzins as player AI and Troy Baker as creator).

And second, it’s fair magnificent. For Aspera isn’t located on a tiled map or static isometric space, it gives you the entire planet to play with, presenting a sense of scale and achievement that is wonderful to sit back and soak up. You can directly zoom in and see your little drones working hard, and you can zoom out and see the entire planet at once, and the best part is finding a place somewhere in between and just moving Mars with the mouse. . It’s god-like, and for all the work that’s been done in the terraforming systems of Mars, I think the galactic presentation of it all can be By Aspera’s greatest success.

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Picture: For Aspera

I’ve been playing the game for about a week now and I love almost every second I spend with it, although it does come with a few minor annoyances. The terraforming effort – and the story behind it – has some serious pacing issues, with stuff flying over you in parts, then remaining deadly silent and monotonous for hours at a time. There is also a whole combat side to the game that seems quite lacking given its importance and destruction.

Per Aspera is a great game if you like to build cities, and it’s a great game if you want to optimize systems and build factories. If you’re looking for something that makes you feel like a less austere Dr. Manhattan, this is fantastic.

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