[b]Take On Mars[/b] makes a strong first impression. The planetary surfaces, terrain textures, and overall presentation are genuinely impressive for an indie game of its time, and the premise has real appeal if you're into space exploration or robotics. Building a rover, attaching instruments, and deploying it to a specific region of Mars is a cool concept on paper, and the art direction does a good job of feeding that fantasy. For a certain type of space geek, the setting alone is enough to draw you in.
Unfortunately, the gameplay loop falls apart quickly. To progress the campaign, you build a rover, strap it to a rocket, and launch it to a mission zone to complete a primary objective. But these missions don't pay enough money to fund the next rover and rocket. To earn that money, you must slowly drive around the surface and hope optional side objectives spawn nearby - and those spawns are random, sometimes requiring you to crawl hundreds of meters at a snail's pace just for the chance at progress. This loop becomes dangerous fast: if a rover flips, breaks, or runs out of power before you've earned enough funding, you can't afford to replace it, effectively soft-locking your campaign unless you reload an old save from hours earlier. Making matters worse, you can only return to a region if you either have a live rover there or an active mission. Lose everything in that zone, and it's permanently inaccessible. The result is a progression system that feels fragile, punishing, and overly reliant on luck.
The rover builder and achievements only add to the frustration. While the editor is conceptually interesting, the game lets you construct rovers that physically cannot complete the objectives they were designed for - like mounting a soil drill directly onto the rover body instead of on an extendable arm that can actually reach the ground. The campaign subtly leads you into these traps, wasting rockets, money, and time. The intentionally clunky controls make more sense dozens of hours in, but getting there is rough. And then there are the achievements: requirements like generating a gigawatt of power, exploring for 333 real-time hours, or driving 5km at night without night vision [u]or headlights[/u] (the achievement only mentions night vision). They're all technically AFK-able, but still absurdly grindy. Worse, based on everything I've read, "Life As We Know It" and "Mars Conqueror" appear to be tied to content that was never finished and are therefore unobtainable.
There are interesting ideas buried here, but the progression traps, grind, and unfinished elements make it very hard to recommend.
