Citizens: On Mars - Prologue

6.5/10 A turn-based puzzle / Mars colony builder TLDR: Essentially a re-skin/variation of the other game of the same developer, Citizens: Far Lands. You place buildings to collect several resources, yet here they don't get depleted. This one has nice graphics but shares the similar problem: precise placement of buildings in 3D is required but the exact "collision shape" of each building is invisible. This leads to tedious trial-and-error fiddling and annoying errors. Good: - nice core idea of spatial optimization: place buildings so that they'd reach as many resource nodes as possible. You have to decide which resources to sacrifice to make room for buildings - music is nice - graphics are nice: UI, 2D, 3D models and textures - free (prologue) So-so: - the introductory levels have a shortened tutorial which I guess would be hard to follow for anyone who hasn't seen the previous game Citizens: Far Lands. However, if you have checked it out, you'd only need to know the minor differences that are easy to discern Bad: - (same as the original game) the game is 3D and physic-based, not tile-based. So e.g. you can rotate a 3D building's blueprint by an arbitrary angle before placing it. Also, you can set the position of a building with extreme precision, as much your mouse allows (of if you zoom in the camera). This results into a strange kind of challenge of finding precise placements of e.g. lumber mills where they wouldn't destroy any forest patches when placed yet still reach 3-4 patches at once. I guess this all uses bounding boxes for collisions? But guess what: those boxes are invisible to the player, so this results into a dumb trial-error process. - in this game the problem is exacerbated but the fact that the outer borders of the playable space aren't clearly marked: they are just slopes of mountains - actually in this game I encountered (several times) the annoying case where a placed building would destroy a nearby resource although while planning it didn't mark the resource in red! My guess is it's because of the tiny shift of the mouse position while the button on the mouse gets clicked. See what kind of problems a precision-based puzzle can have? It's just ridiculous. I found a bug when playing the level where water is introduced: the plants-related building consumed all the water. So there was not enough water for the houses where workers live to function. I placed some water plants - but those didn't get manned by workers as well. As a result, I simultaneously had 6 unemployed workers while the game showed that 4 workers are "needed". I guess it's a circular dependence that came about and could never resolve itself: people need water to work, but water-processing plants need people to work in them for the water to appear. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]