I wish that Epic Games would do its weekly store giveaways on Friday instead of Thursday, because "Free Game Friday" has a really nice flow to it. Instead, we're stuck with, I don't know, "Throw-It-At-You Thursday" or something. It's awkward and clunky, and a little part of me resents missing out on such an easy win. "Get your free game on Free Game Friday!"

The consolation is that, because this is Thursday, we get a free game today. This week's Epic Games Store giveaway is Surviving Mars, a city building sim set on—you guessed it—Mars. It's "fiddly and stressful," we said in our 80/100 review, but "nothing else marries survival and city building so deftly." A sequel, Surviving the Aftermath, is on the way next year.

It's just one free game this week, but next week we'll get two: The Rutger Hauer-starring cyberpunk thriller Observer, and because it's rated M and thus not available to anyone under 17 who hasn't figured out how to switch off the Epic launcher's parental controls, the T-rated Alan Wake's American Nightmare.

Surviving Mars is free until October 17.

Surviving Mars: Green Planet gives you tools to transform the red, dusty rock into a verdant paradise full of cheerful humans and animals wandering around outside and breathing in the lovely air. I've used this opportunity to provide an important service for humanity: I am taking all the horrible geese from Earth and moving them to Mars.

Geese, of course, are villains. All of them. With their mocking honks and unearned air of authority, they wander around Earth like they own the place. No more, I say. Let them instead walk around Mars like they own the place. Starting with this spacious pen I have created for them. 

Unfortunately, to bring animals (including llamas and penguins) to your paradise-in-progress, you'll need to pick the Project Laika content pack along with Green Planet. It feels a bit like double dipping, especially when it's inextricably linked to Green Planet's features, but at least it's under £5/$6. 

It's a slow process, making Mars green, but terraforming comfortably inserts itself into the flow of the game. If you start with the new terraforming mission sponsor and commander, you'll get a leg up and be able to start seeding Mars straight away, but everyone can researching the appropriate tech from Sol 1. 

Seeds brought from Earth or gathered from farms can eventually be deposited in new buildings that spread them across a large area, starting with lichen, building up to grass and eventually trees. None of this can happen without first prepping the hostile world, however. The lack of water, alien atmosphere and low temperature means death to plants. 

Buildings and special projects, like harvesting ice asteroids, are required to make Mars the kind of place that can support life, but conveniently you don't actually need to wait for a dramatic change before you start planting seeds. They'll spread as Mars improves.

Since oxygen and water are incredibly precious, keeping up with the demands of a burgeoning ecosystem and any animals you might have brought along can be tricky. In the early-game, you'll want to get the basics going but still focus on just getting your colony sustainable. Even just one or two forestation plants and the new heating buildings, you'll see some big changes around your colony.

Further down the new tech path, you'll unlock the ability to create lakes and pump greenhouse gasses into the air. Just watch out for the acid rain. Once the environment has advanced to a suitable level, you'll then be able to set your colonists, geese and human, free. They'll be able to live outside instead of being stuck in domes all day. 

I'm not quite at that point, unfortunately, because I didn't follow my own advice, overextended and lost about half of the colony. The geese were left unattended! I'm back on track now, however, and am looking forward to having something like the colony below. 

Even if you don't pick up Green Planet, you'll get access to some terraforming tools, allowing you to do a spot of landscaping. Mars is a rocky place that forces you to build around it, but with the landscaping tools you can flatten terrain, create ramps and, if you end up missing the rocks, you can build some rock formations. 

The free portion of the update also introduces three special projects, new buildings, more event chains and a reworked research UI. There's also a new kind of dome. Well, an old one with some enhancements. The self-sufficient dome is just a basic dome with with life support buildings already attached. It's very handy when starting out, and picking the International Mars Mission sponsor means you'll get to build one right after you've landed.

Both DLCs are out on Steam now. 

Surviving Mars' terraforming expansion, Green Planet, will launch next month alongside Project Laika, a content pack that will let you introduce critters onto your increasingly verdant world. Pups, penguins, you'll even be able to bring a platypus to Mars. Some will be pets, but you'll also be able to raise livestock, too. Check out the feature breakdown of both DLCs above. 

You'll be able to make Mars barely recognisable, seeding it with grass, lichen and trees, and you'll eventually have to melt the icecaps and capture ice asteroids to get all the water you'll need. It looks like it's pretty hands-on at first, but nature will start to take over, spreading organically across the planet. Once Mars has a breathable atmosphere, colonists and animals will finally be able to leave the domes without lugging around oxygen tanks. 

Terraforming introduces new threats, however, including greenhouse gases and acid rain. Also, all these asteroids you'll be capturing? They can slam into the planet and cause a marsquake. Presumably it'll squash any buildings it lands on, too. 

You can see how to start terraforming in the tutorial video below. 

With Green Planet, you'll get seven new terraforming buildings, while Project Laika will add animal farms that will let you breed eight different kinds of livestock, including cows, chickens and pigs. You'll get 25 different pets, too, from the mundane to the exotic. 

I'm looking forward to finding out how penguins fare on an alien world. I've got a feeling they'll be running the place within a year. 

Green Planet and Project Laika are due out on May 16. They're available separately for $19.99 and $5.99, but you can also pick them up together in Green Planet Plus bundle for $23.90.

An important thing to remember about Surviving Mars is that it takes place on Mars, a planet that has a relentlessly hostile environment and requires people to mainly stay indoors. Well, no more: Suviving Mars’ second expansion, called Green Planet, is adding terraforming mechanics to the game.

You’ll be able to reshape the terrain and grow plants, eventually creating a breathable atmosphere. The trailer shows massive stacks releasing steam into the air and filling in ancient craters with water, with trees and grass eventually sprouting up around a colony. 

The paid expansion will arrive alongside a free update for all Surviving Mars players, and Paradox says this will “bring new layers of mid-to-late-game strategic depth” to the game.

Haemimont Games CEO Gabriel Dobrev says terraforming has been the community’s most-requested feature since the game launched.

“Terraforming the surface of Mars is something that has captivated gamers and the human imagination for as long as we can remember,” he said. “It’s something that we took special care to develop and make sure we got right.”

Details on the expansion are thin at the moment, but you can expect Green Planet to arrive in the next few months.

Paradox Interactive has launched Paradox Mods, a modding platform that works across both PC and Xbox One. The publisher partnered with Microsoft to launch it, and you can start downloading mods now. 

Paradox's games typically have great mod support and armies of diligent modders churning out everything for overhauls to minute tweaks right from the get-go, so this probably isn't going to change much on PC. I use Steam Workshop for all my Paradox games, and it's fine. 

The new platform will allow Xbox One users to enjoy some of those mods, however, or at least the 30 console-tested Surviving Mars mods it's launching with. For modders, getting their mods out to both PC and console players is as simple as uploading it, where it will become available for everyone. Presumably, however, some mods will be more suited to the PC version. There are considerably more mods available on PC, too, where the platform also supports Cities: Skylines and Stellaris.

“Modding has been, and remains an important part of the Paradox community. As we have diversified the way we distribute our games, we want to make sure all our players can take part in the creation process,” said Paradox Mods product owner Anders Törlind. “For Surviving Mars, we have worked with mod creators to support Paradox Mods with some of the best mods available, all in one place and downloadable in-game or simply using a web browser. We really look forward to unlocking the world of modding for all members of our community, regardless of what system they are using to play our games.”  

Paradox Mods is live now, with support for more games planned later this year. 

The colony desperately needed botanists. Well, it really needed food, but that wasn’t going to happen without the appropriate specialists running the farms. Starvation was imminent, the prospective pool of recruits back home wasn’t good enough and the colony was in trouble. With disaster nipping at my heels, it was one of Surviving Mars: Space Race’s rival colonies that saved the day. 

Space Race follows the Paradox DLC model. It’s a meaty expansion that brings with it some significant changes and, importantly, gives every player something new thanks to the free features that accompany the paid ones. The most significant of the premium additions is the titular space race. Instead of having the red planet all to yourself, you can optionally share it with up to three competing colonies. 

You can’t visit these colonies, but you can see their location on Mars via the new planetary screen, from which you can get their vital statistics—population, number of buildings, resources—and call them up. There’s trade, espionage, even a bit of charity. It’s a whole family of systems, so you’d probably expect them to have a big, noticeable impact right from the get-go, but my first few hours fiddling with my new colony didn’t inspire me to interact with my rivals at all.

That’s not to say that it was all business as usual. I was playing with one of the new mission sponsors, Brazil. Every sponsor now comes with a unique building or vehicle, and Brazil provided my burgeoning colony with an extremely handy refinery that turned the utterly useless waste rock generated by other buildings into resources that could be exported to Earth. Exports in general also earn more cash. 

Friends with benefits

Picking a mission sponsor now feels more like picking a faction. Your choice encourages a particular approach, not just through the traits and extra tools, but through bespoke objectives that dole out big rewards. The objectives themselves are a bit plain and too easy to forget about, but it’s convenient simply to have a checklist of things to do, giving you some direction. 

Doling out a few quid more for Space Race Plus also gets you some extra cosmetic options. They’re not remotely essential and DLC for DLC is always cheeky, but they do spruce the place up, particularly the domes. You can given them blinds if you want, but watch out, they get filthy with Martian dust. 

On the subject of domes, they can now be linked up! This feature arrived in an earlier free update but having not played for a while, it’s still new to me. It means colonists can independently move between linked domes, travelling through tubes. Services, power and life support get shared by the network, too. It’s extremely convenient and takes some micromanagement pressure off you. 

While I was working away, expanding my colony, I got intermittent messages from my rivals, offering trade deals. Rather than picking resources to trade, you have to wait for your rivals to offer you a specific swap, like some of your concrete for some of their metal. Early on, none of the deals were asking for anything I had in abundance, so I just learned to ignore them. It wasn’t until disaster was looming that I felt compelled to see if I could exploit my rivals.

I finally had resources to trade, but the one thing colonies won’t trade is, not surprisingly, colonists. I could have held out for a food deal, but then I’d be reliant on that finite trade route, and I’d have to keep supplying the colony with another resource. There was another option, however. Covert missions can be undertaken to sabotage rival colonies, steal tech and kidnap ('recruit' is definitely a euphemism) colonists. Unfortunately, you can’t specify a specific type of specialist, like a botanist, but it’s still a viable way of filling in gaps. It also really pisses off the other colony. 

Space saunter

Before that point, I’d never really considered the other colonies to be my opponents, which is strange, given how Space Race is framed as a competition. They just don’t really act like adversaries. They might scan a planetary anomaly before you do, or reach a milestone, taking a potential reward away from you, but they don’t seem to be in a rush to do that either. Even when they beat you to the punch, it doesn’t really feel like a setback. 

The exception to this is when the rival colonies intersect with the new events system. Inspired by Paradox’s grand strategy romps, Space Race throws random narrative events into the mix that confront you with a few choices. Earlier in the game, my colony discovered lots of food inside an unmarked rocket, which nobody was claiming. I decided to bring it into the dome. Big mistake! It had been tampered with by a rival and caused a mini-crisis. Often, they flesh out things that were just glossed over before. Instead of just finding out one of your colonists is unstable, you might instead get an event where they go on a rampage and you have to decide how best to deal with them. 

All the flavour text gives the colony and its inhabitants a lot more character, but it’s more than fluff, getting you directly involved with these problems and story arcs. It’s not overt, but it does feel a little bit like you’re defining your colony through these choices. Sometimes you’re just trying to make the best of a shitty situation, but there’s occasionally a moral component. Upon discovering that a colonist is a troubled savant, for instance, you can choose to sympathise, but you can also choose to see it as an opportunity, exploiting someone vulnerable. 

It wasn’t until I started pissing off my rivals that it started to feel like a race. Annoying them is a risk, of course. They’re not going to offer any trade deals to someone who’s pinching their tech and colonists. I was ready for some pushback. This came in the form of one of my competitors trying to undercut me back on Earth, selling resources for 25 percent less. Since I was loaded, I reckoned I could take the hit, choosing to let the event run its course. They couldn’t afford to do it forever. And that’s how I became the richest man in the solar system, somehow. 

Instead of reducing the amount of money I earned exporting stuff to Earth, it multiplied it by… well, a very big number. Instead of making millions with each cargo rocket, I was making billions. It was very generous, but the bug also meant every obstacle became barely a blip on my radar. Resource scarcity is the the ultimate source of almost every problem in Surviving Mars, but with a nearly infinite supply of cash, I could just keep importing food and metal and all the other stuff I needed from Earth. Just when things were getting a bit competitive, Space Race gave me some rocket boots and launched me towards the finish line. 

I expect I’ll take another crack at nurturing a colony when Surviving Mars: Space Race launches later today. It was a frustrating end for my first attempt, but up until that point I was enjoying revisiting the dusty planet. The rival colonies could definitely do with being more aggressive, but each new system ends up making Surviving Mars a richer management game. I just wish it hadn’t made me so rich. 

Surviving Mars, a colony-building and management game akin to Sim City except the entire planet is a disaster that never stops happening, will get its first expansion later this year. Called Space Race, it puts the greatest nations and most powerful corporations on Earth against one another in a competition to acquire and control the Red Planet's limited resources. 

Players will compete with AI-controlled colonies backed by Earth-bound sponsors to become the dominant power on Mars. You can trade with them, render aid, or jerk them around by luring important colonists to your side. Each sponsor has its own unique vehicle and building, as well as different challenges to be fulfilled on the road to colonization. And there will be new "narrative events" cropping up, "that help reveal the realities of life in the dome and challenge your management skills." 

Surviving Mars: Space Race is available for pre-purchase on Steam for $12/£9. Owners of the Surviving Mars season pass will get it automatically. 

Surviving Mars developer Haemimont Games "made a straight honest to god mistake" by overlooking tutorials, company CEO Gabriel Dobrev told us at PDXCon this year. Since then, Dobrev and his team have steadily tweaked the city-builder in tune with player feedback. It's now announced two free updates to this end: Da Vinci and Sagan. 

Da Vinci rolls out today, and is otherwise known as 'Creative Mode'. Built with "stress-reducing features", such as buildings that require no maintenance, a starting budget of $100 trillion and immortal colonists, Da Vinci is designed to grant players "more creative liberties". 

The flip side of this, due in September, is the Sagan update. And it sounds pretty brutal. 

"The 'Sagan' update, for the explorer who felt that surviving the inhospitable desert of Mars was simply too easy, will launch for all platforms in September," explains publisher Paradox via email. "Including 30 major challenges to overcome, this update adds a new level of difficulty for the hardcore survivalist who’s ready to take a running start at everything the red planet can throw at them.

"Whether you like to stop and smell the barren wastelands of Mars or are raring to discover new ways to doom your dome, Surviving Mars’ upcoming updates will have adventures for every kind of player."

Both updates are free-of-charge, adds Paradox. Da Vinci's patch notes can be read in full this way—which outline some pretty extensive balance adjustments. 

In his 80-scored Surviving Mars review, Fraser concluded that "managing a burgeoning colony never stops being compelling" despite at times being "a lot of hard work". With so much going on, city-builders can overwhelm—which, following player feedback, is why Haemimont Games rolled out a five-part tutorial system in last week's Curiosity update. 

"Before launch, we thought to ourselves: nobody wants to play a tutorial," the developer's CEO Gabriel Dobrev tells me when asked why Surviving Mars shipped without a tutorial. "People would rather jump straight into the game, right? We decided then to build this elaborate game system that gives you a guide at any moment, which tells players what the next best step is. 

"This works well, it gives people a clue, but what I think is missing there—and this is why people wanted a tutorial—is to help players understand the bigger picture. What is the goal here? Sure, the next step might be that I need more power, but where is this going?"

Surviving Mars' Curiosity update adds several new domes, a Colony Control Centre UI tool that helps players later in the game, and a new Infobar that provides an overview of resources and research progress. Each branch of the new five-part tutorial system focuses on specific areas, and while they're designed to be played in order, each is self-contained allowing players to cherry pick as they see fit.   

Dobrev explains that at its core, Surviving Mars is about balancing the way it scales from an empty map to managing thousands of citizens and drones. "It's a big, huge mess, by that point," he says. "It's impossible to control every single person—but initially you start with a few, where it is possible. We needed to balance those opposites and that's where the tutorial came in. 

"On the tutorial question: we made a mistake. A straight, honest to god mistake. To us, the game did not seem that complex because we know it. We decided that, okay, we will do this elaborate system and people will gradually learn it as they go. In the end, it wasn't exactly like that. 

"But that's something we've learned from, and that's something that's very good about Paradox and reflects our thinking as well—that we'll keep listening to players and keep improving the game. The launch is just the beginning."

Check out Fraser's Surviving Mars review in full here, and check out patch notes for the city-builder's Curiosity update in this direction.   

Surviving Mars' domes, in which your colonists live, are one of my favourite things about the game. They're full of colour and light and really stand out from the dusty backdrop of the Red Planet. In an update on Monday, developer Haemimont Games will add five more dome types of various shapes and sizes, and they look very pretty indeed.

I especially like the design of the barrel dome, which you can see below. It's quite small, but it won't require many resources to build, so it should be handy early in the game. You can say the same for the micro dome, another cheap dome that's triangular in shape.

You'll have two larger triangular domes to play with: the Trigon dome and the Mega Trigon dome. They'll provide more space, but their shape makes them harder to place on the map. 

The only dome that actually requires new tech (the others will unlock alongside the old domes as you play) is the Diamond dome, below. That requires a 'breakthrough', which you find by researching anomalies on Mars. It stands out because it can host two Spires—central structures that make your domes more useful. Most other domes can only house one.

Alongside the new domes, the Curiosity update will add a "huge five-part monster of a tutorial", which a lot of new players have been asking for. And rightly so, because the game can get a little complex at times. "Creating a tutorial after release may seem like a waste of effort, but we really want to make our game more welcoming to newcomers and we see this tutorial as very important for the future health of Surviving Mars," the team said in a blog post.

The update also introduces the Command Center, which is basically a massive data tool set that can help you get more information about your buildings, colonists and transportation system, complete with graphs. Lastly, it adds an info bar to the main screen that shows you how your current research project is progressing.

If you're a fan of city builders and haven't yet checked out Surviving Mars, it's worth considering. Read Fraser's review to find out why.