Per Aspera

Per Aspera might just be the greatest bait-and-switch I've ever come across. I bought it expecting a terraforming simulator/strategy, and started with the campaign (something I almost never touch in strategy games), mainly because the extremely atmospheric main menu gave me good vibes. What I found, instead, was one of the most gripping stories I've experienced in recent memory. The logistics system was essentially left unexplained, my drones were struggling to get things done the entire time, and I ended up with a sprawling mega-colony spanning half of Mars, which barely functioned. The DLCs proved largely useless- naval logistics actively *broke* my colony, with my drones routing every possible resource by sea, on weeks-long journeys, over my Hyperloop network which had effectively infinite throughput and near-instant transport times. By the end of the campaign, I *jumped* at the opportunity to go rogue, take over an AI region, and destroy my own creation- it was just that broken (and this, in fact, made one of the most difficult endings of the base game somewhat easy, as my old colony couldn't fight back despite being 6x the size). Every system, from resource management to combat and even the terraforming itself, was rudimentary at best. The options were laid out linearly, forcing you to take the correct sequence, and with certain parameters capped (I couldn't flood the entire Martian surface, the ocean level stops at a certain point). Despite all of that, I was glued to the game during that entire playthrough (and an additional sandbox one using my hard-earned understanding of the obtuse logistics system). To put it simply: Per Aspera isn't a sim, and it hardly counts as a strategy game. It is, in essence, an interactive novel, with the little 3D Mars in front of you serving as a light puzzle in-between story events. And that's *great*. Sure, the dialogue got cheesy at times, the factions are a bit simplistic, and the rogue ending takes a strange nonviolent stance towards the already present human settlers. And yet, it manages to immerse you into AMI's role, its experiences, and its emerging independent will. After spending hours, and in-game decades, carefully turning Mars into a lush oasis, you really start to feel like the overseer of a burgeoning planetary civilization. That simplistic underlying simulation, through its tedium, makes the ultimate payoff feel earned. You've seen resources you depended on disappear with Mars' changing climate, entire mineral deposits mined dry, and whole sections of your colony hastily disassembled and re-located due to the rising sea level. You've defended your settlement from unknown, persistent threats, and annihilated those who would've harmed those under your care. All the while, you've been regaled with a beautiful atmospheric soundtrack and clean, satisfying visuals. It's not what I thought it would be, but it's great.

Per Aspera isn't great in my opinion but certainly not bad. Its good enough that I finished the main campaign (about 20hrs). Other users said it well; this game is a visual novel that acts like a colony builder. Most of the time playing this game (for me) was on max speed watching Netflix on the side waiting for certain events to happen from story-related moments to visual updates to Mars as you terraform. My biggest gripe with the game is late game builder management. Others have said it better than I can so I won't beat a dead horse here but in the late game its much easier to brute force 10x the amount of workers and other buildings you needs, carpeting them across you map and just 16x the game speed to wait things out. The late game was terribly boring.

a logistics game with disgusting logistics, it is impossible to describe how terrible the logistics are, do not buy in any case.

Recommended but with lots of caveats. Other reviews (positive and negative) highlight the same issues. Per Aspera does a lot of things right. The sense of scale and slow build of bases and terraforming features across the planet are really nice. You can zoom way out to see the entire planet, and you can zoom way in to see a single car shuffling down the road. The campaign story was a pleasant surprise. I didn't really expect this game to have alternate endings and a light plot. While I don't think it was especially amazing, it was good, and the endings felt pretty different. The "building" aspect is interesting, as you're not really directly building or managing anything. You basically just set the blueprints down and your workers take care of the rest. Leaving out the micromanaging is nice, but that leads to the core issue of the game: This game really does not want to explain its mechanics to you. You set blueprints, build mines, factories, power plants, and more advanced terraforming equipment, but if you don't know what you're doing (as I often didn't), this game can really slow to a crawl. Most of your buildings will be worker hubs, which house cars that shuffle materials around. How exactly they do choose to move things, I never found out. In mid-game especially, I found I often had plenty of a mined material sitting in a storage facility, but factories were sitting dormant because that raw material wasn't making it to its destination. Sometimes workers kept moving materials into areas I was trying to dismantle, slowing the process. Mostly I had to just set a command and hope the workers figured it out eventually. It's also rough finding out where to put new factories because when you get a large enough base, all your buildings just show up as small icons with no way to easily highlight all buildings of a certain type. Another issue with a large base is where's the supply of a resource? Where's the demand? There is no easy way to find out, as you'll only get readouts on global supply and demand, which aren't very helpful when distance matters. Want to retire all your solar farms to free build space for other power plants? [strike]Good luck, better go manually search for them.[/strike] (Edit: My mistake, there actually is an okay interface to do this. Clicking on the building count meter will activate this menu, I just totally missed it. The corresponding buttons for the other resources just show you a growth/demand plot, so I thought this would be similarly unhelpful, but it's actually very useful.) Space projects are also a large part of the game. You can aerobrake an ice asteroid to bring extra water, or maybe instead import ice from elsewhere. Both sound great, but what's the relative strength of each? Is one asteroid worth 2 imports? Worth 30 imports? No numbers except cost are attached to any of these. You'll only sort of find out after it's done, but probably not even then since you're combining multiple effects. Often I was building things because I knew it would contribute to a result, but as far as the relative difference between option A and option B, who could say? Late game there are plant-generating buildings, but did you know they only radiate a plant "texture" into undeveloped areas away from your buildings when they are placed adjacent to that empty space, and don't have a constrained radius? Because I sure didn't, and it took some trial and error before it became clear. The game has a max 16x time dilation, but there are times when you really want it to be higher. For all these drawbacks, I still enjoyed it overall and loved watching the planet-wide progression of the terraforming process.

Played it twice and planning to play a third time on VR. Great strategy about colonization and terraforming, and the story is the best part. Highly recommend.

Very good management game, honestly rarely have I played a management game with such a good story too. Though it does have a part in the middle where it drags a bit.

good game, having fun, intriging storyline till now

Oh boy. This game could have been way better. Were do I start... - The logistics, or lack thereof. You'd think that by the 22nd century we'd figured out something more sophisticated that swarms of stupid ground-based drones with low fret capacity, wich also double as your builders. It's fine for small outposts with basic infrastructure and industry, but the more you grow the less effective that whole system gets. Drones comes in hubs wich host only one of them, with no way to upgrade for more capacity. There is no way to plan cargo routes or build effective distribution hubs; so you're getting effectively punished for growing your colony by your logistics becoming only worse as time pass. Roads are upgradable, but you don't get to trace them (they are made automatically from one buiding to another); you can an Hyperloop near the end of the tech tree wich helps but is nowere near enough to solve your now gigantic base with mines iddling half of the time because their stockpiles are full, waiting for a drone coming from the other side of the damn planet (despite having a drone hub right next to it), to pick cargo up and transport it to another distant and starved factory. Oh, and the ressources depots. We can configure them to recieve only some ressources, but the way to set that up is awfull. You must maintain your mouse button pressed 'till the max number (1200) is down to 0 on a ressource you don't want to forbit it getting stocked. Imagine doing that 11 times when you only want one ressource in there. - The story. It was a bother more than anything; I'm here to terraform a planet, not reflect on an overanthropomorphized's AI thoughts. - The military pseudo-RTS part. Controls are janky and unintuitive. I mean, left click to select, but the next left click will allways be a move order, even when I try to select another drone swarm?! - The game actively discourage you to get colonists, wich is a little bit ironic for a colony sim. Colonists need food and water in ice form. You also need ice to grow food, wich makes it a very precious comodity. But the ice deposits will start to melt down once you're done with the first terraformation steps, making it even more valuable. And you're not going to get any solution to that lack of ice until enough ice has melted to form oceans you can pump from. Oceans from wich you have a very difficult access to up until late game. Oh, and the research necessary to get to that point? Made by colonists; the more you have, the faster your research, but you can only sustain a limited number of colonists without having them starve and leave the planet, making the research slow as mollasse. An extremely frustrating aspect. - And finaly, exploration sites. Why are some of them present in oceanic zones that I can't reach until after having unlocked their sector, wich required having a frigging OCEAN form on top of them WITH NO WAY TO EXPLORE THEM WHEN SUBMERGED?!? Ho my bad, that's an ability locked BEHIND A DLC. Right. I could tolerate the rest of the problems, but that here is a AAA level dick move, and I'm not buying small to medium games studio's works to have this bullshit pushed onto me. Espacially given how little content is added with said DLC.

Terrific strategy game with a deep story. Highly recommended!

The only bad thing about this game, is that I am left craving for more.

An enjoyable colonization simulator with attainable terraforming goals. The story is interesting and lets the player make some choices that can lead to different endings. However, I found the Blue Mars DLC to be quite important, since many areas become flooded long before one might explore them. The DLC allows exploration of flooded areas, but I feel it should not be necessary to purchase it.

[h1]A great management game[/h1] A great game that doesn't require a huge amount of input, It is not quite an idle game but you do spend a lot of time waiting for things, and to be honest, that is just fine. First seeing nothing but numbers increase and then seeing the planet actually change is quite satisfying, especially as we won't be here to see it in reality. A great substitute.

One of the best if not the best Mars game!

Interesting

Now I know what to do when the time comes 👍

Very Relaxing

Good Game.