Surviving mars wiki dome how to#
Surviving mars wiki dome full#

When you first land you have no colonists, just your trusted band of merry drones and three vehicles one for transporting, one for exploring and analysing anomalies, and one that controls and repairs your drones. Once I could take control, the fun began. (R2 and X will do the job.) But the controls are what they are, and Haemimont Games have done their best to map the variety of functions to every available button, it’s just a case of training those fingers. Once the controls became second nature it wasn’t such a problem, though even now it feels slightly counter-productive not to be able to select a unit with X and press X or another button on the target to interact with it.

Surviving mars wiki dome how to#

I have a PS4 copy, so the controls were always going to be more difficult to master than a PC, and indeed, despite the hints that appeared briefly at the top, it was five minutes before I even figured out how to move a unit. I just dived in to Surviving Mars as a way to discover how intuitive it was to play. When the storyline kicks in later in the game it’s text heavy, so may cause a problem for some with smaller screens. Once I adjusted it, it wasn’t too bad, but it was never really possible to casually speed read. I played this on a 50-inch screen and even on that, sitting quite close, the text was difficult to read. Without some prior knowledge it’s hard to know how important some of the starting factors of the various sponsors are.Īlready from the screenshots you might notice one problem.

Surviving mars wiki dome full#

I would recommend selecting Quick Start from the main menu, just to play for an hour so and get an idea of how things work, before starting a full game. It also shows how abundant the three main resources are: metals, concrete and water (I guess they discovered it after all). Once you’re all set up, you can then choose where on Mars to land, with further indication of difficulty shown by the proclivity of dust devils, dust storms, meteors and cold waves. From the start screen, you can choose your difficulty by way of selecting your sponsor (there’s a cheeky nod to “SpaceY”) with each sponsor offering different perks and starting funds.

This elevates it above standard fare, and while I did encounter a few gripes, this was more to do with the controls and amount of information to manage on a PS4 (as opposed to a PC) than any inherent problems.īefore you can even begin to think about colonists there is the first of three stages. There’s a couple ways they’ve done this: through the colonists, who can have a variety of personality traits as well as specialisations, (and can be renamed, like all the units) and through the addition of mysteries (more of which later). Much like that game, they have done their best to inject a sense of personality into what could have been a pretty cold, sterile game. S urviving Mars is a city-building game set on Mars published by Paradox Interactive and developed by Haemimont Games, the creators of Tropico.