Per Aspera

Я хоть и питаю слабость к градостроям, ОСОБЕННО в тематике колонизации Марса, честно сказать, от этой игры у меня смешанные впечатления, я сидел в ней безвылазно почти две недели по многу часов в день и могу сказать следующее: Плюсы у нее есть, хоть и не многочисленные, как оказалось: Общий наратив здесь действительно на уровне, к дизайнеру всего и вся в этой игре (а может и дизайнерам) не может быть абсолютно никаких вопросов. Игра тебя встречает приятной менюшкой, креативным загрузочным экраном, на первый взгляд абалденным интерфейсом, сюжетом с выбором реплик, которые реально влияют на сюжет (он тут не линейный) и тд. Иииии на этом все, это все плюсы. Сюжет, пожалуй, является главной киллер фичей этой игры, но все прочее оставляет желать лучшего в плане исполнения. Вот честно, не хочется ругать эту игру, она действительно неплоха, но я буквально дропнул ее на последних этапах из-за следующих пунктов. Я не знаю, какой и**от решил, что если сделать так, чтобы дороги между зданий ставились автоматически, причем сразу ко всем остальным, без возможности это контролировать, в начале вроде бы и не заметно, но когда тебе дают возможность агрейдить дороги, тем самым повышая скорость логистики (что ОЧЕНЬ критично в лэйт гейме), то начинается лютый трэш. Поскольку каждое здание имеет автоматом дороги ко всем остальным (напомним, что поверхность Марса далеко не ровная, а выравнивать ее нельзя), они проводятся как угодно, но **ять не как нужно, и получается не линия логистики, а паутина самая настоящая. Тут начинается проявляться самый ужасный минус этой игры, из-за которого я ее дропнул так и не завершив - ВИЗУАЛЬНЫЙ ШУМ на экране, даже хаос. И это мы даже от темы дорог не отошли. Далее, тебе на кой то *ер по дефолту всегда показывается, где какой робот едет, чо он несёт и куда, хотя это можно было бы включить в соответствующую вкладку управления вверху, но нет, отдаляя камеру с начала мидгейма ты параллельно начинаешь а**евать. Ты уже не видишь где, какое здание у тебя стоит, и кстати как-то их выделить или быстро найти тоже нельзя, удачи в поисках какой-то дряхлой неапгрейднутой фабрики по производству г*вна, братанчик. Про фабрики поговорили, идём дальше по цепочке - шахты и ресурсы для Крафта на фабриках. Поскольку разрабы видимо клали *** на очевидные вещи и удобный интерфейс, ты также не можешь абсолютно никак выделить интересующий тебя ресурс и посмотреть, где находятся ближайшие жилы и впринципе любые доступные, тебе приходится "вылавливать" ее глазами среди остальных ресов и прочих "ресурсных" точек в лэйте. При этом если тебе это всё-таки удалось, то когда жила истощится ты не получишь никакого предупреждения, тебе никак об этом не скажут, пустую шахту ты никаких не увидишь в соответующем фильтре, пока сам на нее не наткнешься. Единственное, что тебя предупреждает об истощении жилы - характерный звук отключения постройки, но он не говорит, где, что отключилось, и почему, просто пук в воздух. Далее, узловые точки aka дроны-рабочие, которые таскают шмотки, строят и тд. Казалось бы, ну дай ты какой-нибудь апгрейд в ветке исследований, чтобы игрок мог на одной узловой станции использовать хотя бы сразу двух, а то лучше и более, Дронов, но нет - тебе приходится их ставить по пятьсот штук в одно место, где у тебя добывается куча ресурсов, но работать из них будет, дай бог, половина, остальные будут загорать на марсианском солнышке, балдееееж. В итоге на одной станции может быть очередь предметов 60, на другой, стоящей рядом - 0, и хоть ты взорви Солнце, дрон в ней будет до скончания времён сидеть, и делать абсолююютно н***я. Я не знаю, что мешало с некоторыми зданиями поставлять своего дрона-двух, но вот так вот здесь, б**ть, заведено. Ни исследований, ни исключений, ничего, наслаждайся. Гиперцепь. Одно из самых нужных, но при этом полу-бесполезных исследований и построек в этой игре. Казалось бы, даже в описании написано, что оно строится для перевозки груза на дальние-сверхдальние расстояния, но бл, ты забыл в какой мы игре? Хочешь связать две маленькие дальние колонии в одну сеть? - х**. Хочешь в одной колонии добывать один рес, во второй другой, а потом доставлять их в основную? - х**. Строй сначала до нужного места е**чую линию из узловых станций, солнечных панелей и ремонтных башен, чтобы сделать промежуточные станции, потому что тянется эта ГИПЕРцепь максимум на пару километров. А теперь комбинируем это с душными механиками электро , ремонтной сетей и выше сказанным. Электричество раздается, б**ть по кругу от вырабатывающего здания и соединяется в одну большую сеть только пересечением этих кругов, а не, хотя бы, передается от здания к зданию или, по-человечески, дорогам. Также и с ремонтными центрами, без них впринципе ничего функционировать не может. Честно сказать, я уже устал перечислять подобные маленькие, но пздц какие значительные и бесясие нюансы, решение которых максимально очевидны даже на примере главного конкурента - Survivng Mars. Я редко бросаю игры на пол пути, очень редко, но эта игра настолько задушила своей "не удобностью", что я просто не выдержал, подобные "механики" не только затягивают сам процесс прохождения игры, но и ломают динамику подачи сюжета - главного и единственного серьезного плюса на фоне конкурентов. Есть также что сказать про научные базы. Многие уже описали главную проблему - когда на Марсе появляется вода, они затапливаются и исследовать их становится возможно только купил ДЛС, что я собственно и сделал (обсудим позже). НО это не все. Главная проблема даже не в этом, а то что они критически необходимы дэпоскольку дают серьезный буст к скорости изучения новых технологий, при этом находясь зачастую далеко друг от друга, плюсуем сюда механику гиперцепь, самого логичного пути связки научных баз и основной колонии, затем плюсуем, что до точки нужно как-то добраться (***ть узловым канатом), на это все нужны ресурсы, удачи с льдом и едой, которых всегда не хватает даже с ДЛС, так с ними ещё и квесты никакие не связаны, зачастую. Все точки исследований в рамках сюжета тебе помечают и за ручку до них проводят (открывают так новые сектора планеты). ДЛС, добавляющее надводные постройки крайне странное, во-первых, как все уже обсосасали, это должно было идти по дефолту в игре, а во-вторых, будь добр не повышай уровень воды, иначе твои порты и верфи придется постоянно сносить и строить чуть подальше. Кстати, о портах, я все ещё не понимаю, как работает алгоритм у этих кораблей. Казалось бы, ты воткнул рыбозавод прямо перед портом и поставил приоритет, но эти д*билы вместо отгрузки с него еды, которой вечно не хватает, будут перевозить ресы до другой колонии через пол Марса, хотя и там есть свои корабли, и гиперцепь туда идёт, просто какой-то мем. Я мог бы и дальше продолжать, но за**ался. Все, что я хотел - я сказал, играть или нет - решать тебе. (Если ты дочитал это до конца, то ты герой, впринципе можешь уже и не играть)

游戏是好游戏 但是灌输的政治内容太恶臭了 请务必记住 游戏 这种艺术形式最大的政治价值就在于 他会潜移默化的灌输给你一些观点 然后还会让你觉得这些想法是你自己想出来的 比如在游戏进行一段时间后[spoiler] 你会发现一个火星废弃基地，设定上那是中国在21世纪建设的火星基地 然后会从这个基地里发现一个核弹发射井 科学家和“你”会猜测这个核弹是用来轰炸两极以蒸发二氧化碳让火星变暖的 再过一会就会让“你”思考：是什么样的人会想出来用核弹改造地貌呢 恶心的来了 选项1：疯子 选项2：生意人 好好好这么整是吧。[/spoiler] （↑剧透内容↑） 除了政治内容外游戏还是很好玩的，推荐买，但是警惕他灌输给你的观点

This is a "yes, but..." recommendation. Per Aspera is OK, but not great. It's more of a factory game than a colony builder. Most of what you do is build mines, power supplies and maintenance stations to support those mines, and the occasional factory to produce goods from the raw materials. Colonies provide research points if you provide them with food and water, but you don't do anything more with the colonists like provide entertainment or education. It's food in -> research out. It plateaus in complexity pretty early. Once you've learned to make the basic products, you've seen most of the manufacturing. Later on you need to fiddle with water treatment plants and a water network, but mostly it's still just glass, steel, electronics, parts, and food. A big part of any factory game is logistics, moving materials and parts from point A to B. In a game with conveyor belts like Factorio, you have find control over the flow of objects, and transport can often be a significant challenge. Per Aspera doesn't do this very well. You build robot Workers, and control stations for those Workers. The Workers do what they want, moving materials to to construction sites, and moving materials to and from factories. Workers are supposed to stay near their control hubs, but sometimes they don't. This _mostly_ works, but it can be frustrating when you plant a Worker hub near a mine to unload materials, and then watch it decide to ignore the mine for months. Sometimes the pathfinding is mildly wrong. Not really horribly wrong, but I've watched Workers take detours from A to B to C when there's a direct road between A and C. You can set mines or factories as "priority," and the Workers will tend to go there first, but it's a blunt tool that doesn't really solve the underlying problems. That just means some _other_ factory will get under-served by the Workers. There are a couple of interludes with combat. This isn't challenging. If you heed the warnings that you need a military, you'll have overwhelming force when the enemy does show up. "Military" in this case being a simple matter of building military bases that produce combat drones. After beating the enemy drones you send your drones to carpet bomb the enemy colony. Some of the terraforming mechanics are opaque. For example, there's a "organic dumpster" improvement that supposedly improves Oxygen production, but there's no way to tell how much it's contributing. I only belatedly realized that roads block the spread of plants, so you need to your Biodomes near open spaces or they won't do much. The "Bioengineered Animals" tech does nothing visible, but apparently improves oxygen production. Something that isn't spelled out and isn't intuitive. The less said about the "story" the better. The game frequently presents you with multiple choice questions, where what you answer means absolutely nothing. I found all the NPCs sending me messages annoying at best. On the positive side, you do get to build an absolutely huge base. I had some 1300 buildings or so when I finished the game. Not many factory games have this kind of scale.

I want very badly to like this game. It's a fascinating terraforming journey, with challenging logistical issues, long-term planning, complex interplay of mechanics, and the pleasure of watching Mars turn from a frozen airless wasteland into a verdant world. It's also a coming-of-age story of a cybernetic intelligence doing the best she can, despite her mission and existence becoming political almost as soon as she booted up. Unfortunately, these experiences are ruined by a pair of game-breaking transport bugs and a painful and easily fixable quality-of-life issue involving storage, which are still unfixed over a year after I reported them despite a much-touted anniversary bugfix update, as well as a host of minor QoL issues. There are also some missed opportunities with story-gameplay interaction, but the transport bugs and storage headache are the real problems. If you do go ahead and buy this game, you need to keep a paranoid eye on your construction projects to make sure progress is actually being made on them. Also, be sure to get the Blue Mars dlc as well as the base game, as many resources will be lost to you without it. Until this game can be relied on to actually build what you order built, I can't recommend it.

[h1]Per Aspera, Ad Taedium[/h1] I really wanted to like this game, but I can't recommend it. And unfortunately, it's not even a close call. I like to start with the good, so first: the voice work ranges from serviceable to genuinely excellent. The concept is a strong starting point and is frankly the only reason I stuck with it through the end. And it does a few interesting things, namely the little visual novel-esque choices you get popping up periodically throughout the story. I can't think of any other base-builders that have RPG dialogue choices, even simple binary ones that don't really affect much. I don't want to ding the devs too hard because it feels like they were on to something here, even if the final product didn't turn out to be all that fun. The bad: this might be one of the most mechanically broken games I've ever played. It is a logistics game where your logistics system is completely unfit for purpose. Resources can only be carried between buildings one at a time by worker bots, which you place one at a time and can only travel a short distance away from their hub. One worker per hub. All buildings automatically build a clustered network of roads between themselves, and you have zero--absolutely zero--control over the routes that workers are taking or how resources move from point A to B. This rapidly results in a ragged spiderweb of crisscrossing roads and buildings splattered across the surface of the planet, connected by sluggish workers baton-passing resources around in an incomprehensibly messy, exponentially-expanding network of total chaos. You cannot debug this system, you can barely find bottlenecks, and you can do almost nothing about problems besides building more worker drones which ultimately just makes the problem even worse. The logistics chains themselves are crippled by this, so they are all extremely simple. I don't think a single resource goes more than 2 ingredient levels deep. This means that you unlock the full mine/factory selection within the first hour of the game, and then *never get another*. You have effectively seen all the building management this game offers by the time you finish the tutorial section. There is no strategy whatsoever to base building, you just blindly place mines, slather workers, power, and maintenance towers all over them, and then occasionally build more factories if you have a surplus of resources. Colonists, ostensibly the purpose of the entire terraforming mission, are just another factory that turns food/ice into research points. They are virtually impossible to keep happy, as some will leave no matter how full your stocks are. But it's not that hard to still have thousands of them flocking to the planet and boosting your research enough to have all the important techs (hint: there are not many) done in no time. Combat exists, but it's so simple it's barely worth mentioning. You don't have to research anything beyond the first tier of military techs and you can still easily beat the game. The real challenge is a test of patience. This is a slow, slow, S L O W game. For much of my playtime it effectively served as a nice screen saver. Normally in a logistics game, things happening slowly means you need to go improve your transportation network, or get new resources, or upgrade your workers--but you can't upgrade these workers, your resources will be piling up in the hundreds because of the broken logistics, and the only upgrades you can do to your network are improving roads (useless) or building--gag--hyperloops, which at first seem like they're hugely speeding up your transport, but quickly reveal themselves to be just as useless as the rest of the worker hubs and require the same approach of "smear them everywhere" to accomplish anything. Of the 75+ in-game years it took me to beat the game, at least 40 of them were purely waiting for various buckets to fill. I would wager that across all my playtime probably 60% of it was *waiting*. No input, no decisions, nothing. Just waiting endlessly for the atmo levels to raise or the greenery to slowly spread across the planet surface. x16 speed quickly becomes your normal setting, and doesn't feel anywhere near fast enough. I dragged myself to the ending because I wanted to see the premise's starting point fulfilled, but in the end it just wasn't worth it. This one doesn't have the juice.

I might be blunt, but I feel the game tags and description to be misleading. Steam suggested me this game "because it's similar to other games i played" such as Factorio, ONI, Surviving Mars... yet, the only thing in common with SOME of them, is the top-down visual. TL,DR: This is no managerial base building sim, it's an idle game with some cliché graphic novel elements. Almost non-existent challenge, very few manageable variables, loads of non-consequential diaolgues that do not affect gameplay, and way, WAY too much waiting. LOGISTICS and PRODUCTION PLANNING are trivial: - The whole game comprises of some 10-ish raw/refined resources; - Most important logistics elements are not controllable (eg. automatic sector borders design); - Others are extremely basic (eg. no prioritization hierarchy except for one "high priority" button that effectively works on ONE building at a time); - Product overflow is the only viable strategy other than micro-managing activation/disactivation of buildings, as there is no signal logic of any sort; - The only logistic element you can effectively influence is the placement of buildings and the consequent travel time for worker bots, yet streets are placed down AND modified automatically. SURVIVAL and TOWER DEFENSE are trivial: - Enemies are weak and stupid; - There is only ONE military unit (both ally/enemy) making the "tower defense" elements extremely trivial; - No penalities whatsoever for life support failure (colonist will "leave" when food is scarce just to be right back as soon as it's no longer); - No serious penalities for other logistical failures, eg. low power / overload; - No auto-rebuild function (!!!) forces you to constantly monitor and manually rebuild EVERY SINGLE building in the base, seriously limiting growth and size; - Natural disasters offer no serious challenge or setback - just wait 'til the sandstorm is over then back to business as usual, at the very worst a few colonists will have left for a temporary holiday off-world when their dome was suddenly hit by a meteor with them inside sleeping but they will be right back. STORY is cliché: - AI "considerations" are whimsical and cliché; - Storyline is non-consequential, the player can choose from multiple answers yet it does not affect gameplay at all.

This game is alright, but it has too many rough edges for me to recommend it. The UI is very unclear, for example buildings don't work and it's hard to tell why. The buildings are also very hard to tell apart and it's difficult to get a good sense of what's going on in your base. There is also many ways to 'brick' your game, e.g. sometimes there isn't enough carbon or iron to produce steel, and expanding to get more steel also requires steel. Or there are random events that can destroy your base, and this may disable all the workers, thus making it impossible to fix. This ends up being pretty annoying when it happens after a few hours and it means you have to just start over, hoping that you don't get the bad luck again.

I like space games. I like colonising planets and terraforming them. I like city builders. So how come I didn’t like this game? [list] [*] Pacing. The game is 90% waiting. And I mean waiting at 16x speed, the maximum this game allows, still feels extremely slow, as everything takes an absolutely insane amount of time. And this isn’t some kind of waiting that will be interrupted by an event or something interesting to do - nope, you launch the game and go do things around the house. By the time you are done with cleaning, cooking and whatever else - you may need to click a thing or two. [*] Tech tree. Can you imagine a sci-fi game with a tech tree half of which is useless? Because this game does that: T2 buildings that cost more and produce less than 2 T1 buildings (and considering that you have an entire planet saving space is not a problem this game requires you to solve); science projects that are one-use only; projects that are relevant only at one specific point in the game. Moving through such a tech tree was equally dull and disappointing, not to mention extremely slow with all of the projects taking way too much time to complete. [*] Logistics. For a logistics game this game has a terrible system that has exactly one solution - you are required to spam drone hubs. And since said drones will only move in a certain radius you will end up with a chaotic mess instead of a structured base, as you will just spam said hubs in whatever gap you find. And even with that the drones will do whatever to avoid being effective: the building needs 4 iron to be constructed? Deliver 3 and move to another task. 2 resources to start production? Deliver one. [*] Repetition. Because of your technology not giving you any better tools to advance your base resource gathering you will be building the exact same extractors and drone hubs you were building 5 minutes into the game for your entire playthrough. This gets boring extremely fast. [*] Terraforming. Sure, you can make the planet habitable. Filling a hole though or flattening a hill so you can place a building there? Absolutely impossible, sorry. [*] Combat. Why is it here? It is extremely basic, extremely dull, not even slightly challenging and serves zero purpose. [*] Story. One one hand sure, there is a story and 3 possible endings. On the other hand - the writing isn’t really good, the voice acting is just bad and the story isn’t that deep. As an example: on the very first step you can use nukes to melt the ice caps, but everyone talks about how this can have consequences. Do you know what the consequences are? None. And I would be surprised if using a few nukes on an irradiated planet would cause much trouble. And it goes for most events - characters talk a lot but there is no actual connection to your gameplay, and demanding tones are just irritating. [*] UI. It isn’t good. Some information is useless, other is never to be found. The one you want and that is in the game is somewhere under 3 layers of menus. An easy example: you have a few thousands of one resource but the factories that require it don’t work - and you have no idea where said resources are. And it is extremely clutered - every single building and drone has an icon or two, and there will be hundreds of them even in the midgame - the map becomes unreadable a few hours into the run. [/list] Overall the experience of playing this game was closer to watching the paint dry - you play for a bit and then wait for hours until your terraforming stage progresses and you can play a little more.