Surviving Mars has been around for a couple of years now and has received quite a bit of DLC since its initial release. Haemimont Games, the original developers of Surviving Mars has moved on to another project and Surviving Mars is now in the hands of Abstraction Games.
Abstraction Game’s latest DLC for Surviving Mars is known as Below and Beyond and this introduces two brand new aspects to the title. Players can now build underground or can mine passing asteroids for minerals and more. Asteroids are a higher risk since they are time limited and you need to plan your expeditions carefully so as to not lose valuable resources.
Playing Surviving Mars, gamers will know that this game is a significant time sink. You’ll spend hours and hours in Surviving Mars building up your colony and making sure that everything works.
Your life support systems, your resource management, research etc, are all to be run under your watchful eye and it’s great when everything works.
Below and Beyond however alters this and unfortunately not in a good way. The main problem being that players have to deal with a cumbersome loading screen when switching between areas.
This interrupts the flow of gameplay and makes it extremely tedious and annoying when you have to deal with problems on either map. Swapping between the above ground area to the below ground or asteroid becomes a massive chore when things get hectic and it’s really not a fun experience at all.
Players will have to invest a lot of time and effort building up their main Martian surface base before even being able to truly access the Below and Beyond content. Once they can though, it makes matters worse because you’ll soon realise that you just wasted perfectly good resources all for lacklustre rewards and additional stress.
Below and Beyond seem like an unnecessary afterthought to an already great game and it’s a shame because the premise of mining asteroids and exploring the underground caverns of Mars sounded amazing.
The Below and Beyond DLC is also extremely buggy right now even after three post-launch patches. It’s also unfortunate that this DLC has sullied the base game too by introducing brand new issues and problems, such as crashing to desktop and broken drones.
If you’re looking to play Surviving Mars and the Below and Beyond DLC, I’d suggest waiting for a few more patches and hoping that all the current issues are resolved.
Abstraction Games are clearly still working on this title and I hope that they are able to salvage what has been a rather dismal DLC add-on to a great game.
