Mars Base is a pixelated simulation game where your task is to build a colony on Mars.
Will the red planet bring me luck? Or will it be a desolate, dusty experience?
Mars Base puts you right into the game. Solana welcomes you on the landing platform, and your first task is to create equipment that provides basic needs: water, energy and oxygen. There is a logic to the equipment requirements – the water tank and oxygen machine need energy, and the water tank requires oxygen. Once you build a solar panel using available materials, you can then build an oxygen machine and then a water tank. After talking to Solana, she gives you the blueprints for the base and bed, suggesting you get some rest.
The next day, a new person is waiting for you on the landing platform. Mystaria gives you a tool to extract materials from Martian soil and asks you to build a research lab. Every few days someone new arrives – a farmer who wants a greenhouse, then a merchant who wants to build a market, and so on. Some colonists arrive in groups, eventually numbering around 18. A few colonists will give you tasks to break up the monotony of soil extraction, so it’s worth talking to the new arrivals.
In addition to meeting colonists and building different buildings, you can also farm in Mars Base. Crops are available when you build a greenhouse and a market, and later you can build a chicken coop and animal barn. Animals can be sent to the ranch, which functions as a small zoo attraction and is a great way to earn money. The ranch is full of trees, but while you can cut down the trees, you can’t remove the stumps, making it difficult to move through the area.
You can also explore mines, where you will fight monsters and be rewarded with materials and seeds. Alternatively, you can take your rocket ship to a space mine and collect even more resources.
One of the great things about Mars Base is the mini-games. Due to the lack of natural lakes or rivers, fishing takes place over reservoirs. It is enough to properly time the lowering of the net when the fish passes by it.
Later you can build a food shop and play a cooking mini-game. Colonists come to your shop and order dishes, and you have a limited time to prepare and serve as many of them as possible. At the end of the game, you get money, minus the cost of ingredients you didn’t have with you.
With the arrival of Janet, you get the chance to use the rover to navigate the surface of Mars, and The Mars Rover Racetrack offers a racing mini-game.
After building the carpentry, you can buy home improvement items. There are also decorations that you can create to beautify the space outside the house.
You’ll soon have a fully functional base on Mars.
After building a research lab, Mystaria will allow you to customize your character’s appearance and name it. Various bio-suit hairstyles and designs are available, with a wide selection of colors. This is one of the places where Mars Base shows its origins as a PC game – the controls are a bit clunky. For example, you can only move up or down, so if you accidentally move the cursor left or right, you will change some other attribute.
The controls and menus take a bit of getting used to, but the game works well in both docked and handheld mode (although it lacks touchscreen support). Available options are related to sound/music and display of on-screen controls. Mars Base automatically records when you go to sleep, and there is a “save and quit” option in the menu. Each user can have up to three different instances of the game.
It is also possible to add a local helper to your base. Another player takes control of a small robot that follows your character and can help with watering and harvesting (but not planting), combat, soil extraction and cooking. This is useful for occasional help, but is not designed as a two-player game.
The length of the day depends on your stamina – as you approach the last quarter of your stamina bar, the screen darkens, leaving only a small circle of light around your character. If you pass out, you will lose 50 gold. All in all, it took me about 10 hours to build my base on Mars.
Mars Base offers a wide range of activities – from crafting, to fighting and fishing, to farming and mini-games. However, the game lacks depth as much as breadth – conversations quickly become repetitive and tasks limited. Even so, I enjoyed every moment of building my base on Mars.
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