Surviving Mars: Relaunched

It's a genuinely solid game on its own merits, though if you played the original your opinion may be a tad mixed. As somebody who has played both, this is generally an improvement over the original at it's best in a bunch of small ways that don't really warrant an entirely separate game, but it's a generally an improvement. Launch was a complete disaster, as has become typical of paradox the last few years, but after extensive patching it's definitely in a better place than the original these days. As for what's new, it's mostly the politics system, but since I never bought the below and beyond dlc (because they were unforgivably buggy at launch), I count those as new features too. Politics is even easier to manage than frostpunk 2's (and the inspiration is obvious), but it offers genuinely helpful bonuses that if you stack them right are really nice. I was able to get it down to just 10 fuel a rocket pretty early on in my spaceY run, and that was before I even built the assembly. Rigging the vote in your favor is pretty trivial, and it pays very well. Asteroids are fun and give temporary, but rather nice bonuses to your economy, offering easily accessible resources that can be shipped back to the colony for peanuts. the initial infrastructure cost is a bit steep, but exotic minerals sell like hot cakes. One decent asteroid worth of them will fund a dozen more prefabbed mining ops, so you don't even really need to beeline for mass producing advanced resources or anything. Hell, my current run is barely even trying to do more than keep up with maintenance, I've been bulk ordering everything else I need, and I've been keeping up just fine with the money. below ground is a fun exploration challenge, though I've been holding off setting up permanent habitation there thanks to the marsquakes. I'll update this with more data later.

I was an owner of the original game with several hundred hours in it. I loved it. I even compared it to other city builders as a city-builder developers should strive toward (granted I never bought the beyond and below DLC). I only recently purchased this after the free update changes that Feeding the Future DLC brought and I can recommend it to both new and returning players. If you are a returning player wait for a sale, but a new player will absolutely find their money's worth in just the base game alone. The original game really pigeon-holed you into specific starts and challenges, it was tough to really get different flavors for sponsors and this was primarily due to the tech system. Even if you wanted to try to cheese to different techs you could be hamstrung but their randomized spawn locations in the tech tree. With the changes SMR now has sponsor and leader choices can grant serious boons to your gameplay and how you develop your colony. I have heard from a lot of hardcore city-building folks complain about the difficulty curve being lessened but it will still be a good challenge for new and returning players and re-playability has absolutely increased. There's still some small holes and nitpicks I have about logistics chains but they're relatively minor (the only "push" factor of resources exists on producers so resource depots can only exist as pull factors in a logistics chain, which means without manual intervention you can starve out certain parts of the chain). it's a pretty solid game. I put it in the 80-90th percentile of all city builders. It's relatively polished with some good depth. you could absolutely do worse things with your money and $20 (on sale) isn't a bad price for what you're getting. It is showing improvement and I think the overall changes (post disastrous launch) are overall good and add robustness and diversity to a game that could be pretty rigid in the original.