Surviving Mars / YMMV

Awesome Music: The game's main theme is quite beautiful, sombre, and uplifting. It really makes you feel you're traveling to Mars yourself. The various radio channels also offer a nice selection of songs from diverse genres, so even if you don't like the main theme, chances are you'll find something else to your liking in the soundtrack.
Game-Breaker: The Mars International Mission. Zeus rockets can carry more, colonists never become Earthsick, food carried in passenger rockets is greatly increased, and rockets slowly synthesize fuel on Mars. If all of that wasn't enough, they also can build an Advanced Stirling Generator that outputs four times the power of a normal one for only double the price of raw materials. The Easy Mode sponsor recommended for first-time players, but experienced city builder types might find this too much of a breeze. Some tutorial videos even suggest new players to avoid it, as the difficulty of the game would be increased several times the time they try another sponsor.
Goddamn Bats: Renegades. Once they spawn it can be a nightmare to deal with them. They steal food which is bad if you're already having food shortages. They can blow up things including the dome. They can hijack a whole dome from you. They cannot be "adjusted" by the sanitarium. Security stations will usually only keep them in check (although they can get terminated with extreme prejudice if you get lucky, but it's random and almost never occurs). No wonder that there's tons of mods to deal with them, some in unorthodox ways.
Harsher in Hindsight: In the Flat Mars Society random event, if the loony Martians are left to their own devices, they'd build a shoddy rocket to try to get themselves up to orbit and ultimately get themselves killed in a crash. "Mad" Mike Hughes, a flat earther, has been building rockets to take him to the stratosphere so he can prove that the Earth is flat. He was killed when his last rocket crashed in late February 2020.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- The use of passages to link domes together sounds great, until you realize that it only links one dome to the next, meaning that your Colonists won't travel to that nifty entertainment dome you built because there's a science dome in the way.
- Again, renegades. They spawn when the average morale in the dome dips too low, and they're a handful to deal with when you already have enough problems to begin with. And unlike Haemimont's previous games, there's no way to order termination with extreme prejudice on the offender, and the only way they can be offed if they get into a brawl with security officers and get killed in the process. Many players consider them a poorly planned, tacked-on afterthought. It's no surprise that there are third party mods to allow the players to eradicate them.
- The Underground and Asteroid missions added in Below and Beyond offer no real meaningful rewards, don't integrate properly with the main colony, require constant micro-management, and each map requires going through a loading screen to manage. Many players feel that whatever good ideas were behind the mechanics, they ultimately failed badly in execution.
Slow-Paced Beginning:
- The pre-colonist phase of a new game can be a bit on the slow side, even with the game sped up. Unless more concrete is shipped from earth, obtaining the hundreds needed for the first dome and its infrastructure can take a very long time (and that isn't always an option, as rockets are limited and the ability to create fuel requires a prefab or research). Later versions gave the International Mars Mission a self-sufficient dome prefab^note to speed things along a bit before new players got bored.
- The Founder stage itself can be nearly as bad. Starting with only 12 founders is extremely uncomfortable since the game doesn't let them work multiple shifts — they will only work one 8 hours and 20 minutes^note shift a day and that's it. Granted, the effect can be minimized by vetting your passengers carefully, but it is still nerve wrecking to see the morale bar hover between the high 40s and low 60s depending on time of day, with very little you can do about it until you get the green light to ship in more manpower.

YMMV / Surviving Mars

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