Surviving Mars: Pioneer

The bare minimum product. It's Subnautica, but on mars. Instead of a large, interesting and varied environments you're surrounded by red planes. There's also grey caves and generic, empty buildings. Resource gathering is a pain. You'll revisit the same spots over and over, pointing a quickly overheating extractor at texture decals and go back to base once your inventory is full for hours. Automated extraction would have been a must in my opinion. Maybe it even exists, but far to late into the game. There are too many crafting stations. Some do exactly one thing. If they want their game to be immersive, they're doing it in the wrong place. The overall polish is also just barely acceptable. In 7 hours I've seen missing colliders, objects not loading, extremely bad UVs in a story location, a full game crash, a phantom object clogging up storage, essential items disappearing into thin air and holes on several major objects. Also, if you start a story objective and return home before you complete it, prepare to hear a 6 second music loop for the next five minutes.

Not sure what's going on...but the game loads up only for me to not be able to use my Quest 3 controllers. I have played with Steam input selections and other troubleshooting...the only thing my controllers do is respond to haptics when I reach for the tools at the intro...the controllers jiggle...but thumbsticks and buttons are useless. To start the game I can reach out and touch comp screen but using thumbstick or triggers to select is useless.

Well, 1) It would be nice to know how to actually get research points. Tutorials always repeat the basics common to most VR games but completely avoid details specific to this game. For example, scanning: it just says “this scanner is used to scan.” Wow, really? But scan what exactly? Where do I normally find scan-able items? By the time you figure it out, you’re dead. 2) I’m not sure how a single person, deployed before drones arrive, is supposed to fit into the Surviving Mars story. From what I played, drones are always sent first, resources aren’t gathered directly but through mining equipment, and you live in domes, not habitats. The only thing this game and Surviving Mars seem to share is that they both take place on Mars. 3) A far better direction would be to start as a commander in an orbiting station, using drones to set up the initial survivable base. Then, once you launch the first ship (the founders), you could join them. After that, you’d work in a similar station on the ground. Once you have structures that humans could realistically build (like dome interiors), then you could go down in first person. Need more metal or rare resources? Once mines are built, you could jump in to help alongside your assigned workers. Once I got over the initial “ha ha, I’m a spaceman” moment, I died fumbling with an oxygen tank and aimlessly stumbling around trying to find something to scan for the quest. The novelty wore off in about 30 minutes. It feels more like a off-brand "Planet Crafter", rather then a Surviving Mars title.

Had an issue at first with the buttonmaps not working on index, got it working after changing the buttonmap in steamvr on my own, but the defaults are still broken. Havent gotten far in game but thought i'd mention.

Limited support for Vive 1 controllers. Despite this controller being quite common, support for it is very limited, and the tutorial presumes I have a very different controller. Remapping is difficult as well, since the game does not seem to use named inputs, instead using a Unity engine standard that does not translate well to controller mapping in SteamVR. This is a shame, since I truly love the colony builder this game is based on, and this VR game seems very promising. However, with the current controller scheme for my controller, acually playing the game becomes a futile effort.

I wanted to like this game, but tried it for 13 minutes and refunded it. Too arcade, time runs incredible fast, minutes running faster than seconds, in 2 minutes out of the capsule you already have no more oxygen, the jumping jets are too hard to control in fine jumps, no immersion, no feeling of being on another planet. I liked the intro watching mars form the capsule, but when on the surface everything went really in the wrong direction. I'd appreciate any suggestion about a game like this one but more realistic.

The game is a pretty decent survival game. Simple to learn, fun to explore, little danger with default difficulty. Only complaint is it feels like it was pushed out of early access a little too soon, but not because of bugs, though there are some present. The end game seems lacking as the only thing to do is rush to the end. There is potential built in to make the end game more exciting but it's clear there are some voids. For instance, enhanced versions of structures exists, but there's no ability to make them yourself, even though plenty of crafted items could make it happen. At least there's suit upgrades, though depending on playstyle they're not necessary past grade 3. It starts with making your base, though it took a little bit for me to figure out how to get out of the drop pod. Tutorials and instructions are simple but effective...was able to quickly get a base going before going to a different zone. Every zone introduces something new to harvest, which is needed to build more structures and craft items, eventually being able to indoor farm (hydroponics style) to make food. The goal of the game is simple: disable some towers then escape. Towers are locked and need to find the key, which involves a simple puzzle, though the first time doing the puzzle took a little to understand what to do. Environments are pretty nice. Each zone has points of interest worth exploring since they have lots of items to take. Some points of interest have different puzzles which were pretty fun to complete even if not that difficult. If the title isn't any indication, it's themed around surviving mars, so all such models can be found in every zone, including drones and rovers. You even eventually get to go inside a dome. There's also original models like mining machines you can activate. It's a good game to play that's not hard on the senses, easy to learn, and pretty chill. Can spend time decorating your base as long as you remember to scan the decorations whenever you go to points of interest. I give it a recommended, though the developer should do some polish for the bugs that remain and give higher grade craftables something to do other than be sold.

Developer apparently not able to get index controllers working. After 15 min of trying to build some powermodule and pressing all buttons the game does not want to build anything. modify yes but build oh no.. My god why do these developers keep on creating these non working turds... sigh.. deinstall and on the pile of so many vr games that have failed.

Hours of fun and makes you think before you act. Graphics are great and the game runs smoothly.

This Game is awesome once you give it a chance, a little quirky at first until you learn the mechanics of the game .I played the game for 4 straight hours it is addicting and fun, the graphic's and sound is done very well as is the atmosphere. Now that I gave it a chance I'm extremely happy I did, I hope the developer continues to expand on the aspects of this truly fun Game.