Surviving Mars: Pioneer is a strategic, base-building survival sport that launches right now on Quest and PC VR in early entry. Branching out from their earlier Metroidvania-style shooter, Genotype, developer Bolverk Video games are buying and selling fast-paced motion for slow-burning stress and useful resource management-driven gameplay.
Surviving Mars: Pioneer begins by establishing gamers as contract colonists tasked with surviving the tough Martian atmosphere with solely a modest bundle of beginning assets. The early sport loop revolves round harvesting minerals to maintain you and slowly develop a fledgling settlement. It’s a fragile juggling act: collect sufficient supplies to remain alive whereas additionally working in direction of researching superior constructions and tech.
Gameplay appears at its finest whenever you’re teetering on the sting of survival and making doubtlessly life-threatening danger/reward selections. Do you retain mining copper for that all-important furnace? Or do you harvest the iron it is advisable promote to afford the meals processor blueprint required so you may survive lengthy sufficient to maintain mining that copper? It’s these sorts of small-scale useful resource administration dilemmas that Surviving Mars: Pioneer excels at, and this logistical ballet types the core expertise.
Whereas Surviving Mars: Pioneer nails the quiet isolation of solo colonization, it’s not with out its tough patches. Whereas there are enemy encounters, we have not skilled that but so the one actual menace we have seen up to now is dwindling provides and the ticking clock in your oxygen and vitamin ranges. This will make the early sport really feel like a little bit of a slog, particularly when trekking throughout lengthy, barren landscapes to proceed your harvesting.
Finally, you unlock a hoverbike and with it, a welcome sense of velocity and mobility. However this comes at a value as battery energy turns into yet one more useful resource to handle. Each choice and each merchandise used is weighed in opposition to not solely the shortage of the useful resource, but additionally the worth tag you attribute to the considerably monotonous means of harvesting its substitute.
After three hours, I had kind of exhausted the assets within the beginning zone and ready to enterprise into uncharted areas. The dimensions of this map suggests a considerable quantity of content material lies past the preliminary space and as new areas open, it is possible that the challenges will develop into richer and extra assorted.
Sadly, this development system is undermined by a VR interface that feels prefer it ignores the teachings of the final decade or so. Core mechanics usually depend on clunky laser pointer interactions and flat, desktop-like menus. Stock administration is the right instance: slightly than, say, bodily grabbing a backpack to entry your 16-slot grid of house goodies, the sport asks gamers to press a button that summons a menu that comprises just one possibility – ‘Stock’. You then want to pick out this selection to name up a grid that then simply hovers in entrance of you with none context within the sport world.
Mounting your hoverbike? No grabbing handlebars or vaulting into place right here. As an alternative, you purpose your pointer on the bike, which brings up one other menu consisting of solely a single possibility, which you then want to pick out. It’s maddening.
These unintuitive design selections really feel like a regression, particularly contemplating that 2023’s Genotype affords rather more VR-centric interplay design. Whilst you do finally adapt to the awkward controls, it’s a sorely missed alternative and one which simply mustn’t have occurred in 2025.
With efficiency, it’s value noting that the Quest model truly outshines the PC VR construct. Whereas each characteristic the identical mechanics, the Quest iteration presently feels extra polished and steady. My time with the PC VR model was marred by technical points, together with a vanished save file and a glitch on the rocket pad that broke the core buying and selling mechanic, amongst different issues.
My desktop makes use of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB, an Intel i9-11900 processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 1TB Gen4 M.2 SSD. For PC VR, this was performed utilizing a Quest 3 by way of Digital Desktop. You’ll find the minimal and advisable specs on the Steam web page to be taught extra.
Surviving Mars: Pioneer is sometimes irritating, however in the end appears compelling in the event you take pleasure in survival video games. It’s not making an attempt to be No Man’s Sky, so action-hungry gamers ought to mood their expectations. However, for followers of slower-paced, systems-driven gameplay and methodical exploration, this could be value a glance.
Surviving Mars: Pioneer is on the market now on Quest and Steam headsets.
