Ship Us Mars takes place ten years after the occasions of Ship Us the Moon and this time, as the sport’s title suggests, you may be journeying to our neighbouring planet. You play as a younger astronaut, Kathy Johanson, who’s a part of a staff tasked with travelling to Mars to retrieve some very important know-how within the hopes of saving the dying Earth.
In the event you’ve performed the unique sport then lots of the characters you meet will probably be acquainted to you. When you may play this as a standalone title, you may get much more out of it and have a a lot larger understanding of the story and your crew’s motives in case you play Ship Us the Moon first.
This time round, the story has a way more private and intimate really feel to it. Whereas there’s all the time the backdrop of your mission to avoid wasting Earth, it is extra the relationships between the varied characters that’ll hold you wanting to maneuver ahead and uncover extra. There are some completely implausible performances from lots of the voice actors which actually assist to boost a number of the emotional moments you may come throughout.
Kathy is not simply looking for know-how to assist save our residence planet, but additionally to uncover what’s occurred to the Mars colonists, together with her father. As you discover you may achieve a larger understanding of what is going on on by discovering varied collectables. These come within the type of holograms, textual content messages, and notes between the colonists, which is able to begin to fill in a number of the blanks. You are solely given little bits of knowledge at a time, nevertheless it’s all the time simply sufficient to make you need to proceed and discover the following clue. What makes issues actually fascinating is that almost all of the characters you meet are morally ambiguous. You may actually begin to query if what you and your staff are doing is the ‘proper’ factor to do.
Sometimes you may come throughout varied puzzles which block your manner. Issues like locked doorways the place you may have to place power beams to open them, or decryption puzzles that have you ever shifting your little flying robotic pal Ayla round. These puzzles begin off merely however develop in complexity as you get additional via the sport. None of them are significantly troublesome, however that is really a very good factor because it means the tempo of the sport is rarely slowed down. You may continuously be pushing ahead to attempt to uncover the following piece of the story.
One of many huge new mechanics within the sport is climbing. Kathy is rather more nimble than the unique astronaut, and might climb utilizing her ice picks to journey up surfaces on Mars, or alongside material insulation contained in the area station. You may management every arm individually, manually repositioning every decide after which utilizing the L2 and R2 triggers to stab your picks into the wall in an effort to climb. It appears neat at first and it is simple to get right into a rhythm of alternating between the triggers, nevertheless it rapidly will get tiresome.
There is a motive most video games simply routinely let your character climb. Having to do it manually will not be solely sluggish nevertheless it additionally tires out your fingers. There are some accessibility choices like solely having to make use of one of many triggers, however you may nonetheless be continuously holding it down so not one of the choices actually assist. It may also be fairly finicky each time it’s a must to leap throughout gaps to the following climbable part, and as a rule you may find yourself throwing your self in fully the fallacious course to your premature loss of life.
There are a variety of various environments you may get to discover, not simply the crimson sands of Mars but additionally an area station, an icy valley, in addition to some scenes on Earth. There’s positively one thing very lovely and serene about driving an area rover throughout the desolate panorama, or looking via a porthole into the depths of the cosmos. It is a bit of a disgrace, then, that Earth is much less visually spectacular. The setting tends for use for flashbacks which inform Kathy’s backstory, however they lose a few of their emotional affect as a consequence of body charge slow-down and frequent pop-in, which is far much less noticeable in every single place else within the sport.
Sadly, we did run into a few bugs throughout our six to eight-hour playthrough, issues like being unable to work together with mechanisms which are wanted to open doorways. For probably the most half the sport’s frequent autosaving means a fast reload by no means places you too far again. Nonetheless, we did run into one annoying state of affairs the place the sport autosaved us proper in entrance of a lethal spinning fan, which means we had been locked in a cycle of reloading into instantaneous loss of life. The one manner we managed to resolve that was by fully restarting the chapter.
Many of those points are pretty minor, although, and it would not cease Ship Us Mars being a brilliantly fascinating journey. Certain, the puzzles are pretty easy however there are sufficient epic set items, intriguing collectables, story twists, and a splendidly atmospheric soundtrack that you will be totally invested in seeing Kathy’s journey via to the top. Developer KeokeN Interactive has positively constructed on the successes of the primary sport to create one other poignant storyline that’ll maintain your consideration for its complete run-time.
Conclusion
Ship Us Mars has an entrancing sci-fi story that may hold you considering lengthy after the credit roll. There are just a few little points, equivalent to a boring climbing mechanic and body charge drops on Earth, however with some implausible voice appearing it is simple to get actually invested within the characters and the destiny of humanity. The easy puzzles do a very good job at giving your mind a bit of exercise whereas by no means being so taxing that they decelerate the tempo of the motion. Total, this can be a nice follow-up that delivers a compelling sci-fi narrative.