Destination Ares

My current favorite game on steam - a hidden gem! It's tragic that most people haven't found this game. Definitely worth the price for me. Reminds me a lot of FTL. I think if you like FTL, you'll like this game. I watched the videos on the store page, thought I would enjoy the game, and enjoyed it even more than I imagined. I wouldn't pay much attention to negative reviews before October 13th 2017 - the latest patch. It also helps if you're good at doing minesweeper quickly. Current best run: got to 99% and died. Also died a little inside, in real life. :)

I played for a few hours tonight after receiving a key to test it out and I must say, I had a great time. It was a little bit confusing at first but the more I played, the better I was able to pick up the systems and what to do in order to progress. As others have mentioned, the mini game you play when making decisions is a bit odd in how it fits in to the grand scheme of things, but once I figured out how to solve it, I didnt care about why I had to do it. The game is really fun. Going through and trying to manage all of the systems to make it to your destination gets very stressful (in a good way) as you get closer to the destination. The events that pop up keep things interesting along the way. I found myself caring for the crew and when they died, I was genuinely saddened for them. There is a ship builder and I had a ton of fun with that as well. I was able to make my own Y-Wing from Star Wars that I was then able to take into the single player campagn. (We all died...) I definitely recommend this game for those looking for a simple, good time and are willing to push through the initial learning curve. Some compare it to FTL but I cannot do that as I have never played it.

Very bad interface, rendering minigames and crew control next to impossible.

Destination ares is a short, Yet difficult and fun, Resource management based game about leading a ship to your destination planet, "Ares." While it is, As said previously, Short, This does not by any means detract any sort of positive experiences from the game. Pros: Easily "Launched, Played, Left, Repeated" Interesting concept Art style is simplistic yet functional Cons: Easily forgotten- You could play this game for a hour and forget about it for another two months before repeating the process. It's a short game. This could be a positive, But overall i would consider this a negative due to its forgettability. I would reccomend this to a friend as of current, If only to be bought on sale, Though i feel i would be more comfortable with its current price once it is more delevoped in the future.

I do get that the point is that it's supposed to be hard to reach Ares, but when you're two minutes into the run and say "yep, not going to reach Ares" you know that something is not quite right. To me, the main problem is your agency. In Destination Ares everything has a chance to break on usage. Even when you tell a crew member to fix some equipment they will take their time trying to fix the thing, they don't succede and go away instead of trying to fix the thing again.

Very poorly explained mechanics, with no severe telegraphing of what causes what, or what certain traits or attributes mean. User interface both ugly and buggy. Extremely prone to the spiral-of-death effect; it only takes a few simultaneous failures to be basically unable to recover. Idiot crewmembers who take forever to get anything done, only for them to fail at said thing, and no real way to mitigate that. Random events which have a minigame attached to them that will end in failure even if you succeed at said minigame. You have so little control that even if things momentarily go right, it feels more like I dodged a bullet by accident, and not like I did something to warrant said success. This adds up to something that is very frustrating, and not nearly enough fun to make up for it.

DISCLAIMER: If you don't like resource management, you probably won't enjoy this game! Great little game, don't be put off by the price! It reflects the care and dedication that has been put into it by the creator. The premise on the surface appears simple. You are the artificial intelligence of a colony ship, charged with getting your human cargo to Mars. You control power to the ship's systems, but you cannot repair them when they break down. For this you need your humans, just like they need you for breathable air and a working kitchen. Whilst you can set alarms of varying degrees of urgency to alert them to broken or compromised systems, they won't always respond to them as they should do. On top of this your ship is old, the parts are mostly cobbled together from whatever your humans could afford. So everything breaks down. EVERYTHING! From the oxygen scrubbers that keep the crew from suffocating to the toilet to the controls of the ship itself. Repairing them takes time and effort, adding to the above problems that affect your valiant colonists. But repair them you must. No oxygen scrubber? No air. Everyone dies. No controls? You go wildly off course and actually begin to head AWAY from Mars rather than towards it. Then you run out of air or power. Everyone dies. No toilet? I shouldn't even have to explain that one. Somehow, everyone dies. Poop and space don't mix you know. Here is where the resources come in. Your current resources are displayed in a box at the top of the game screen, which also displays your progress towards Mars out of 100%. The oxygen the humans breathe, the power you use to run the ship, the food, the spare parts for fixing things. Fuel for the engine and raw materials that can be used by various on board systems to create more of the other resources. Finally, there's waste, expelled by the crew after each meal. All of these resources tie in together in a well thought out loop. A lack of any one will almost always lead to total failure, an inability to eat leading to the crew passing out and being unable to repair broken systems, to give just one example. Luckily you can outfit your ship with various devices to produce or recycle these resources, getting you that little bit further towards the red planet. The ship itself is designed from scratch by you, in a surprisingly versatile ship builder in which you can set everything from the number of compartments the ship has to how many resources it starts out with. Failure encourages a whole new ship design, tweaking resources and setting modifiers on ship systems to improve them. It feels like you get a bit closer to success each time. The crew are also fully customizable, interacting with you as they scoot around the ship, responding to your alarms and warnings. The way they speak feels like a kind of futuristic slang, an attempt to translate the efficiency of computing into human interaction. Hints are dropped at a decaying Earth you've left behind, one you really don't want to return to. A nice touch that I found adds to the overall atmosphere. (no pun intended) The graphics are minimalistic but work well in the games setting. The sound is great, a whole host of boops and beeps and ambience. The red alert warning you can place on broken critical systems is particularly alarming. (again no pun intended) The game is tough, but success is possible. Every attempt gives you advancement points that you can use to unlock new ship systems and crewmember abilities. I had to unlock everything before I made it to Mars on my 23rd attempt, with one unit of energy, nearly everything on board broken, and no spare parts to fix it. For the first time in a while, I felt genuinely satisfied upon having completed a video game. An even nicer surprise was the words "Ending 1/6" after the win text box. I've since managed to beat the game again with another ending. Each game is so short you can play it for ages, then stop, then play again and have a new experience each time. The only thing I would criticise is the at times clunky user interface, which can sometimes result in accidental turning off of important things or placing needless alarms on working systems that take up valuable crew time that could be spent fixing that solar sail that broke like 25 days ago. Part of that last one is the crews fault I guess. This extends into the minigame that others have mentioned, essentially minesweeper but with yellow dots to warn you where the mines are. Its a smart addition that avoids the RNG element but can get frustrating at first as the tutorial is a bit ambiguous. Overall though, what seems to be a relatively simple game turns out to possess a considerable amount of depth and replayability. I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who likes resource management or sci-fi in general, and for the original idea and story.

Destination Ares some how manages to keep me engaged. While it's difficult, I feel like surviving is very achievable. I'm enjoying learning the game. While things can be simple, it's complicated enough for me to have to really think about how to stay alive. Also, I feel like a less evil HAL 9000.