Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

For years the possiblity of colonizing mars has been studied by scientists. It will not be easy, themartian environment poses huge problems. On earth, there is always
enough oxygen to breathe and water ispretty easy to find. Waste is recylced by bacteria in the endless circle of life. All these conditions are not present on mars
and have to be created artificially before any attempt can be made to sustain life on the red planet.

Toni's entry is a simulator of a future martian colony. It keeps track of the storage and flow of important nutrients and other molecules, and you can build processing
plants and other facilities to help convert molecules that power the cycle of life.

This is a great idea for a game and could be a lot of fun to play. However, such a simulator is very complicated and needs a lot of tuning before it works properly.
Therefore this entry is based on a cool idea but has a lot of gameplay problems.

First of all the screen is very static. You see nothing but a big map of the planet mars and some numbers that change every second or so. It would be much more
interesting to see graphs instead of figures, because that is prettier and also easier to interpret.

As said before, you can build plants to produce certain types of molecules. For example, you can use a chemical plant to produce CH4 (methane). There are some
balancing issues here however. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way to use Carbonmonoxide (CO).There are plenty of ways to produce CO though,
which means that the CO storage is a sink where everything will end up eventually. Or is the goal here to avoid CO production as much as possible? Unfortunately
the readme.txt is not clear on that, or possible strategies.

Another prolem is that there is no clear goal. You can set goals for yourself e.g. to try to keep the colony alive as long as possible, but I haven't managed to starve
the colonists yet before I had enough of watching a bunch of numbers.

implementation of the rules, and scoring:

genre requirement - 4 Mars theme pretty obivous. The gameplay fits really well with this genre requirement, one of the few entries that is not just
pong/pacman/tetris set on mars.

technical requirement - 3

artistical requirement - 5

overall - 3

cool idea, technically interesting but not enough gameplay to be entertaining.

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None