Surviving Mars: Pioneer

This is my fav game of 2025 so far. If, like me, you love Subnautica, you'll be into this. It's a grind-heavy survival game where you'll explore and collect minerals and resources with which to craft and build. You start with a jetpack but eventually get a hover bike and rover. It's in early access, so expect some bugs and, at the moment, don't even expect an ending because there isn't one. It took me 23 hours to complete everything. Once they add more content, I'll be back in for sure. Here's my gameplay https://youtu.be/UMh9pTLyy9U

The biggest issue this game has is the graphics. Steam version does not look very different from the Quest one, which, in its turn, looks as if it was developed with Quest 1 in mind. This is kind of weird, especially knowing that Bolverk Games' previous game - Genotype - was among the best-looking standalone experiences on Quest 2. So in the opening minutes I was disappointed with what I see and did not feel particularly compelled to keep playing. Luckily, the gameplay kicked in fast enough and I got engaged, ending up with ~18 hours of a great experience with Surviving Mars: Pioneer. Depending on your pace, the game has about 15 to 25 hours of gameplay before you start feeling that you've done everything you possibly could here. And this is way more that most modern VR games have to offer. The gameplay is 50% base-building and resource management and 50% exploring. The game is not heavy on micro-management and generally leans towards casual gameplay (which is a good thing). What's most important is that all mechanics do feel very polished and, at times, super-addictive. Let it be jet-packing, gathering resources with the extractor or driving the rover - it's all very fun (well, maybe not always fun with the rover). So while this game lacks in appearance, it definitely delivers in substance and the Early Access version feels pretty complete. I would rate Pioneer as an essential VR experience of 2025 (just give yourself a few minutes to get used to the visuals).

For those hopping for the martian in vr, this isn't it. But it is fun.

Im used to playing Vr chat and this feels super intuitive. Even tho it doesn't have individual fingertracking I have to give this a 5/5. The music is dynamic and changes depending on what you do or where you are going, It doesn't explicitly tell you everything so it feels both frustrating and then rewarding to figure things out, however there is a current objectives menue that makes the game more streamlined and helps you to not get completely stuck, saving often is key. I never got into "Subnautica" because I thought it looked too vibrant and too much like the Sims mixed with fortnite, This doesn't have that glaring Unreal Engine-like artstyle and feels more in line with something like portal. Because you're in a spacesuit the bulkiness of your VR headset doesn't bother you. this game looks fantastic on oled and if you have index controllers that are stuck to your hands without having to hold them this feels like getting transported into "Planet Crafter" but then it turns more into "Portal" also unlike Planet crafter, the elements you mine arent just pieces scattered randomly across the surface, they are instead embeded in the rocks and rock walls and canyons. also worth comparing this game to is "Wall-E"and the movie "Oblivion" or "Lego Mars Mission". There is an option in the settings menue to turn off the pointer line by changing the opacity to 0%, use that because it makes the game so much more immersive, the last update was great and added grabbing your backpack and direct touch on touch screens, so make sure you keep up with the update logs on steam 👍 Its honestly shocking how good, well balanced and full fledged this game is for beeing a Vr game so early on, if you liked Robinson the journey your gonna love this. Playing this gives you the feeling of beeing the last person left in a museum wondering if they might close the doors and trap you inside for the night

not made for the HTC vive total shyt sandwich to play