Take On Mars is a planet exploration simulation game developed by Bohemia Interactive. There are two types of vehicles in Take On Mars, rovers and landers. Landers are stationary platforms that have the most tools and instruments, while being able to completely spin their platform in a full circle. Rovers are very slow moving vehicles with six wheels, with less options for equipment but being able to move makes up for that. All vehicles come equipped with different types of surveying tools and cameras, night vision and lights, and solar panels to make sure that they don’t run out of power. It is possible to either edit already exisiting rovers and landers, or completely make one on your own where you can choose all the contraptions that will be on it.
Clicking on the Mars map will bring up locations where you can currently send vehicles to scout out and test the martian surface. When you click on a mission, you can select which vehicle you want to send down as well as seeing all of the objectives that need to be completed during it. Upon deployment, you will be watching your rover or lander descending through the atmosphere of Mars, which can take around 5 minutes if you are trying to land a rover. Completing missions will earn you money in which you can use to unlock new areas to deploy to, and being able to send down better and more effective landers and rovers.
There are only a few objectives that can be done during Take On Mars, and hopefully more get added or the game will get old quick. The simplest goal is to just simply go to a certain point, which is actually a starting point for the actual goals. Taking pictures is the most common task to complete, which just requires you to go into camera mode and take pictures of landmarks when the UI turns green. Taking samples is the other big main task, and there are different types and ways to do it. Landers will have probes that you lower from underneath them into the ground, allowing you to take samples of the ground around there. There will be atmosphere and radiation readings that you can take from the air, with sensors on top of your rover or lander. Driving up to certain rocks in your rover will also allow you to sample them.
It is easily noticeable that they made a realistic version of mars for you explore. If you select real time as an option, it will be dark on Mars the same time it is dark in real life. This can make the game hard since your rovers won’t be able to gain power from their solar panels if you play at night time.
There is an editor present in the game that allows you to create custom scenarios to play in. You can’t change the landscape of Mars for obvious reasons, but you can designate areas that need to be scanned or have pictures taken of. Hopefully this tool will eventually allow us to do more than just place a waypoint for a soil scan.
A large amount of options, and ones that you never see in other games, are available in Take On Mars. You can choose to use a joystick instead of the usual mouse and keyboard, and change the units of measurements from imperial and metric. All other types of options exist such as changing graphic settings, volume sliders, and the ability to rebind all of your keys. Graphics are simple but not ugly, and even if they were amazing graphics it wouldn’t add anything since all there is to see is the surface of Mars, which is just a lot of red rock to begin with. It isn’t very well optimized at max settings, since it runs very slow even though you don’t see much detail that would cause that to happen. There isn’t a whole lot of sound in the game other than your rover being deployed, cameras moving, and your rover moving around. Music is perfect, since it is the type that gives you the sense of being on a desolate planet.
Other than maybe figuring out what buttons do what, you won’t run into any kind of difficulty. Objectives in missions require no skill, they just need you to reach certain spots and take samples or pictures of certain objects. Other than a somewhat lengthy landing period for rovers and long distances between major goals, nothing in Take On Mars takes a long time to do. You can leave at any time and it will automatically save.
There is nothing that would make you say Take On Mars is only for hardcore players, though there are some elements that make the game somewhat hard. If you don’t time it correctly, you may be playing on mars while it is night time, causing your vehicles to not gain power from solar panels and will force you to play at a different time of day. Selecting the realistic time option will cause you to not be able to skip ahead in time to circumvent the night time issues. Other than basic mission progress and unlocking higher tech vehicles, there isn’t much currently to do aside from the main missions. There are a few optional missions to do that are near the major missions, but they aren’t anything special.
Take On Mars currently costs 13 dollars, but may increase in price as time goes on like most other early access games. Once again, compared to a lot of other early access games this one has actual content, and not 30 minutes of gameplay that a lot of them seem to have. If you are looking for a game that is more about exploration and simulation, and not actual gameplay mechanics, it is worth the money. Even if you are only somewhat interested and still not sure, simply supporting the game by buying it will ensure that better and more features will be added.
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