Paradox Interactive's colony builder Surviving Mars, which officially resumed development earlier this year under the watchful eye of Abstraction Games, is getting a brand-new "premium" expansion, titled Below and Beyond, next Tuesday 7th September.

Surviving Mars - which challenges players to rejuvenate the wastes of the red planet, transforming it into a thriving colony of shimmering domes - was well-received when it launched in 2018. A selection of DLC followed, but Below and Beyond will be the game's first major expansion since 2019's Green Planet. A free tourism update released earlier this year.

Below and Beyond, as its name implies, takes the colony builder to new locales, going below Mars' surface and beyond its horizon so that players may turn their attention to building underground bases, mining asteroids, and gathering rare resources.

Read more

Paradox Interactive's colony builder Surviving Mars has resumed development and will expand this Monday, 15th March, with a free new tourism update and the In-Dome Buildings Pack.

Surviving Mars - which challenges players to rejuvenate the wastes of the red planet, eventually transforming the world into a thriving colony of shimmering domes - initially launched in 2018, and received its last major expansion, Green Planet, the following year.

All's been quiet since then, but development has now resumed under the watchful eye of Abstraction, which is taking over from Surviving Mars' original creator Haemimont Games.

Read more

Paradox Interactive has announced Space Race, the first big expansion for its space colony construction and management sim Surviving Mars. It's set to release "soon" on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

Space Race takes the core colony building set-up of the base game, and introduces a new competitive twist. You'll no longer be working to establish a thriving colony in isolation; instead, as you expand your own interstellar settlement, other AI colonies will be competing for control of Mars' limited resources, to claim anomalies, and to reach certain progress milestones, all in a bid to become the planet's dominant superpower.

However, while colonies are all in direct competition, a certain degree of interaction may be beneficial. You can, for instance, trade with competitors, respond to their distress calls and issue your own, or even steal their most promising colonists for your own nefarious ends.

Read more…

Survive Mars? It took me the best part of a day to decide where to land. And with good reason: there's a lot of stuff to think about from the very off here in this wonderfully detailed planet colonisation sim. I'm not sure that on my most recent attempt at surviving Mars - spoiler: I didn't - I was any quicker at finding a parking spot than I was on my initial outing.

Firstly, what to name the initial rocket? Tricky business! I tend not to rename things in games these days. Not quite so much, anyway. Soldiers? Too many of them, and they only die on you. Cities? Who is bolshy enough to think they deserve to decide what an entire city should be called? But a rocket? Christ, there is romance to a rocket. Romance and the suspicion that they will be in limited supply. I was going to call my first Surviving Mars rocket Feynman, but I couldn't bring myself to type that in given the dim view he sometimes took of the whole space mission stuff. So I went with Hawking. He has been in all our minds this week, of course, and he has always struck me as the kind of man who would enjoy getting his name stuck on a rocket.

What to pack in the rocket? An eternity of fretting. (This is why I've never progressed very far with Dwarf Fortress, which Surviving Mars, at times, kind of reminds me of.) And then the landing zone. This stuff is crucial. Not only do you get to spin a beautiful globe of Mars to pick your spot, probably choosing, your first few times, between a few suggestions the game has made for you in advance, when you finally do pick that spot you then have to pick a smaller spot within it. You use up a few probes to reveal the terrain in any sectors that look promising - nice and flat for building stuff - and then you try to slot yourself in between resources. Concrete's crucial in the early game. Metals would be nice. You can make oxygen pretty much anywhere and ditto electricity. What you're really looking for, I think, is water. Your first landing brings no people with it, just drones, and with drones you try to get the essentials running - oxygen, electricity, water - and then you can build your first habitation dome, plug it into the grids and pipes and start thinking about making food and calling in some actual human crew.

Read more…

Surviving Mars, the promising-looking survival-builder from Haemimont (Tropico, Victor Vran) comes out on 15th March for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, publisher Paradox has announced.

In the game you have to design and maintain a colony on Mars. You start with rovers and supply drops and have to build habitats for settlers from Earth. The environment is hostile and resources are scarce, but once you gain a foothold you can expand, with the ultimate goal of establishing a thriving society.

The PC version includes full modding tools and support, with mods available at launch from some of Paradox's most prominent community creators.

Read more…