Dissent on Mars

And here I thought the last game I reviewed was the most boring game on steam. But it seems I was mistaken. Dissent on Mars takes the graphical design similar to Rimworld and decided to make a game that was not in any way, shape or form similar to Rimworld. With clunky confusing mechanics, a lackluster uninformed tutorial, lack of animations, sound effects, voice acting, or any real mechanics similar to a colony sim game and then goes and demands you pay 30 dollars. I was bored. I was confused. I was annoyed. I was lost. I was bored again. And eventually just gave up and quit. I’m not sure if it’s the gameplay design, the tutorial, or what but I simply couldn’t figure this game out. When I did what it told me to do nothing worked. When I tried to do it on my own nothing worked. When I started messing around nothing worked. And yet the game’s NOT broken. It’s just poorly designed. I knew what I was getting into when I entered the game but that colony sim tag had me hopeful and thinking I’d be going into something I already had a working knowledge of. But let me warn you, this is NOT a colony sim. There’s no resource management, no harvest time or build time or way to progress. Wanna know why? Cuz the game gives you everything like you're the God of Mars. Need more wood? Spawn them in and instantly harvest them. No wait time included. Everything you build is basically painted into the background with zero animations. Only the colonists have animations. There’s ambiance and music but zero sound effects. For a game talking about limitless possibilities in terms of shaping your own society there sure are a lot of limits in this game. Limits in what you can build, how to build, where to build. Limits on setups for the game. Limits on policies and decisions and customizations. A whole lot of limits where I wasn’t expecting them. All this for the low low price of 30 dollars!? Yeah no thanks. Not even remotely worth it. But if you’d like a more in-depth look at the game with more information please feel free to check out the review on my YouTube Channel. (Link Below). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sanMrCDmg8 Otherwise, thanks so much for reading and I hope I managed to help some of you out there spend your money wisely.

I really wanted to like it, it's such an interesting and unique concept, but it just isn't very good. I am going to try to stick to reviewing the game it's trying to be, the game it wants to be. A lot of negative reviews of this game focus on what they expected it to be, a Rimworld-esque colony sim. I feel like it's unfair to judge the game based on that, because it's not *trying* to do that at all. What it's actually trying to be is a bigger-picture political simulator, in which the player designs a society - its economic system, government, etc. - and observes how those decisions play out by putting a bunch of simulated people in the society they built and watching it go. There are not many games out there which do what this game is trying to do, and I *really* wish this one had succeeded, because that core idea is very solid and has a lot of potential, but after making a few attempts and experimenting a bit, I am sad to say that it does not pull it off. The first and most fundamental problem is that there's very few options. There are a lot of menus in the new game screen, with dropdowns for selecting different kinds of resource allocation, property ownership, workplace management model, etc., but almost all of them are specific to one of the three economic models ('market', 'central planning', and 'democratic planning'). Many of those dropdowns have exactly one selectable option for any given economic model, which you are locked into and must choose unless you go back to the first menu and change to a different model. There aren't anywhere near as many possible combinations as it might appear at a glance, and because you do not really have a choice for most of these options since they're specific to a certain economic model, most of the menus after the first are basically meaningless. You cannot, for example, have a market economy with state ownership of the means of production, despite this having been attempted multiple times in real life. You cannot have a centrally-planned economy with cooperative ownership of the means of production, another thing which has been experimented with in real life. There's a few things you can tweak, but basically you're limited to a selection of four options - central planning, 'democratic planning', free market with private ownership, and free market with cooperative ownership. Mixed economies are also not an option (you cannot, say, have some industries state-owned and some privately-owned, or a combination of privately-owned businesses and cooperatives). The overwhelming majority of the development effort here seems to have gone into just one of these options, 'democratic planning', which has far more detailed and extensive mechanics than any of the other models. (as an aside, many of these limits are really arbitrary - you can, for example, still have all personal property be state-owned even in a free market economy, which means you can have a system where the government owns your toothbrush but you own the toothbrush factory, which is extremely funny) This seriously undermines the game's goal of being a sandbox in which you can experiment with tweaking different values to see their effects on the simulation - the list of things you can play around with isn't very long and almost all of them only have a couple of different options to choose from. It wouldn't be a dealbreaker on its own - just give me those four options and that could still be interesting - if not for the simulation itself, the thing these values are supposed to be effecting, which has its own problems. The game is an agent-based simulation, with your community being composed of individual colonists. Each colonist has a set of skills that govern what they are good at doing, needs which need to be satisfied, and passions and traits which determine likes and dislikes. All needs (except housing, which is satisfied by simply having a house, which are placed by the player and then assigned to colonists by the player) are satisfied by consuming a product, and each product is produced at a building by a colonist performing labor. Each product manufactured requires the building to have access to certain natural resources - e.g. a bakery needs wheat and water to make bread. Colonists work to produce products, are paid money (mostly based on labor, but potentially also including a universal survival allowance, or extra pay for being the owner of a building, depending on economic model), and use the money to purchase available products to satisfy their needs. Products are consumed upon use and must be replaced constantly, all products are perishable and are discarded after a time if overproduced, and there is no secondary market or transfer of products from colonist to colonist - all products go from producer->distribution->consumer and then cease to exist. No labor is required for any part of this process except production, with all colonist labor going directly into manufacturing. Natural resources are placed freely by the player, can be placed anywhere, and there is no cost to placing them. They do not require labor to extract, they do not need to be stored, they are not perishable, they do not need to be processed into any intermediate form before being used by a workplace (e.g. a bathtub factory makes bathtubs directly out of copper ore without anyone needing to refine it), and there is no market on which these raw materials are bought or sold. All resources are either owned directly by a workplace and can only be used by the owning workplace, or are owned by the state/collective and can be freely used by any workplace which needs them. If they are owned by a workplace, the way the workplace acquired those resources is that the player assigned them, they are not purchased on a market, which means that all land and resources are effectively state-owned regardless of which economic system the player chose at game start. In addition to all resources being placed by the player, all land use of any kind is determined by the player. All production buildings, all housing, all distribution buildings are placed manually, and all of it happens instantly and takes no labor. Even in a market economy, no one will ever respond to a shortage of a certain good by building a new factory, nor will the collective vote to do so in a democratically-planned one. A building which has a shortage of raw materials cannot attempt to pay a higher price to purchase more. Workplaces themselves also cannot be bought or sold as far as I can tell, and ownership of them is assigned manually. This is an extremely simplistic economic model, and there's just not a lot you can do with it. Things are made, things are consumed, everyone either has all the products they need to fill their mood bars or they do not, and then the next day it all happens again. Individual colonists might have traits that make them prefer or dislike a certain product, but that's really the only reason to even bother making multiple products of a certain type, instead of just supplying everyone's hygiene need solely with copper bathtubs. The simplicity of it means there's not a lot of room for differences between the various societies, and all of them seem to play largely the same. There are plenty of additional issues - the UI is confusing and extremely difficult to navigate, useful data is scarce and scattered around a ton of different menus, etc. - but the most well-designed UI in the world would not solve the game's main problems. I have played this game for about three hours and feel like I've experienced pretty much everything it has to offer, and that's a real shame, because there's a solid idea here. I want to be able to recommend this, because I want this developer to keep making games, to refine their skills and iterate on these ideas. I just can't, though. This game is *thirty bucks*! A very reluctant thumbs down. Keep at it, though, man.

I'm sorry - this just isn't fun. I have requested a refund. It looks like Rimworld and seems advertised as a colony builder, but it isn't. This might be fine as a simple society simulation designing different governments and whatnot, but advertise it as such and don't make me think this is a colony builder. So many things don't make sense. One example - resources are unlimited. Why are they even in the game. EVEN IF IT WERE ACCURATELY ADVERTISED: $30 just to see what it looks like to perfect different societies? No thanks Very difficult to learn how to play. The tutorial takes you through some basics, but I tried a market based economy and have no idea how to employ 20 people when I only have 8 workplaces that the owners complain they don't get to work enough. I have many more things to say, but honestly, stay away.

I love spreadsheets It's a quite complicated colony builder, there is A LOT of data and many different economic laws. Before the release I've seen a lot of people calling this game a Rimworld rip-off. It's not. Rimworld focuses on survival of a small group on a more or less wild world. This game however, is like a development of an advanced society. You don't fight hunger, wild animals and barbarians. You fight commodity distribution, large-scale planning, means of production ownership and political agendas

Damn. I want to like this... but it's just sorta obtuse right now. And it isn't early access... so i don't know if there's actually any plan for that to change. The long and short of it is that the game doesn't really explain how to do things. The tutorial is fine... but the big takeaway is the basic controls. It tries to explain how to do things long term... but ultimately, the real issue is that the tasks given don't reiterate what you need to accomplish them. Example: Adam wants strawberry bread from the bakery. Ok great. Let's go check the distribution center. There is none. Ok, sure let's go walk Adam to the bakery and try making the bread. It won't let me. "0 planned". That makes no sense. I click on whatever the economic building is, and it says it will let you make 2 strawberry bread. I double check the request log... and all it says is he wants 2. No instructions on how to do it, and nothing unfolds to explain more. Where's the help entry on how to do it? Well presumably somewhere in the massive help file, but I'm not even sure why I can't make it so I'd need to read each one to figure it out. And honestly, this is only an hour in... not exactly what I want to do. I think it has potential but it needed more time to bake. I haven't decided how I'll go forward with this game or if I will yet.

I'll preface this by saying that this isn't a game for me, but beside that... It's definitely not worthy of the price in any way, both graphically and gameplay-wise-ly. An interesting social experimenting game that could have used several more months of UI refining and UI un-dumbifying. Doing anything is needlessly fiddly.

All for one, and one for all. I am happy to finally have a colony game that focuses on bigger-picture issues. Having been accustomed to the norms of psychology and personal relationships in these types of games, it is a refreshing shift in perspective to deal with things such as ownership, employment, and finances.

For much of the twentieth century, there have been just two main models of economy: Markets (capitalism) and command-planning (socialism/communism). Both have their faults, and it's in recent decades where research into a different third-way, called democratic planning, tries to address the faults of markets and command planning. I've been a researcher of democratically-planned economies for several years. Most of the work I've dealt with when it comes to such economies has been tremendously abstract, dealing with mathematical formalisms and models. There hasn't been a real sinew-and-bone flesh-and-blood simulation of a democratically-planned economy, until Dissent on Mars landed. The game tutorial walks you through the details of what to do, to help you build an intuition for what to do and to make updates where you feel like changes ought be made. The game full of rich details (would you like a rhododendron in your allocation room?) that are devoid from other simulations of democratically-planned economies. And a clever idea -- to set up such an economy on Mars! You can even set up market and command planning economies to see how those economies work, or as the case might be -- don't work. Dissent on Mars helps fill a void in the simulation space for democratic-planning economies and economic simulations more generally, and helps to expand the imagination of the possible. My compliments to the developers who put a lot of thought in to the game.

Boring. Hardly anything to do. Not worth $27 let alone $5. Just a heads up. You are being ripped off.

Let me first say that I have play tested this game several times throughout its development and have dedicated countless hours to it. I still haven't come close to seeing everything the game has to offer. This isn't your average colony builder. Instead of just managing resources and buildings, you'll spend a lot of the time shaping the politics and economic systems in your society. From free markets to democratic planning, from autocratic workplaces to democratic workplaces, from state ownership to private ownership, the game encourages you to experiment with all these options and many more, to create your very own system of government that has not yet been seen on Earth. Of course, all these options would mean nothing without people, and this is where the colonists come in and where the game truly shines. You can see how all your choices affect not just society as a whole, but the individual colonists. Each colonist has their own personalities, wants, and needs and this keeps you on your toes as you delicately balance and experiment with all these systems to keep your colonists happy. They'll go to work, eat, socialize, and if you aren't careful, protest and riot. On one of my last play tests I gave one colonist ownership of 90% of the businesses in the colony. Let's just say the colonists were not too happy with the large wealth gap that was created... There are also Long Term and Short Term Goals to work towards throughout the game. This game has incredible depth and can easily last you dozens of hours as you experiment with its systems and try to create a better and better society for everyone to reach those goals. Or maybe you want to create the worst society possible. There are goals for that as well and you will see the consequences, both good and bad, of every decision you make on the lives of every colonist in your society. Having played many hours of the game already while testing, I still haven't come close to reaching one of the Long Term Goals. I look forward to spending more time in the game working towards them.