Per Aspera Reviews

mind warping i like it

got it on sale and it was totally worth it! loved the pace, the story, explorations. really nice terraforming visuals.

This game has more dialog and phone calls than my marriage. Just STFU and let me play already. I had to play this one with voice audio off and skipped all the conversations. All of them. The entire ecosystem fell on its face because maintenance drones are the stupidest AI in the game. No wait the stupidest AI in the game would have to be the worker drones, yes those little time vampires have the combined IQ of my fish tank. Game was fun until it was not, that was a period of about a week. Had great starting replay potential but this one goes into the dust vault.

Very enjoyable for the full 20 hours I put into it. Fun city building mechanic, fun storyline, and the "realistic" difficulty was fairly easy but I probably wouldn't have been happier with the higher difficulty. The only thing that caught me was that the research tree had a scroll bar I didn't notice until the very end. It cuased my last 2 hours to drag a little bit as I had to catch up on my missing technology.

This game is very similar to Surviving Mars however this game... feels better even though they are technically different games this one is less of a Paradox Games Nightmare filled with bad DLCs and a small or non-existant pool of gameplay and interesting lore to comb through which this game has both of the latter in full force and that just makes me happy!

i've been on a hunt for a martian resource manager that scratches that specific itch and so far per aspera is killing it. also pleasantly surprised that the story is pretty engaging esp for a sim and god damnit troy baker you cant keep getting away with playing father figures i am SOBBING

Liked the storyline. Nice mix of building and problem solving. Tech tree advance made sense.

basically they turned the kim stanley robinson trilogy into a city-builder. there's a ton of production value here in the voice acting, the UI, and the general visual design. but it's pretty lacking in gameplay mechanics, game system transparency, and the logistics model. buildings don't clearly show their production/consumption rates. the worker-territory system is limiting, buggy, and a huge step down if you're used to other logistics games with more sophisticated controls still, it's compelling. there's a long core game loop of dealing with the consequences of your own actions. like, ice is a limited resource, which pushes you to flood mars, which in turn forces you to retreat from the rising waters, but then opens up liquid water as a resource. if you're willing to deal with the logistics jank it's worth at least one playthrough

fun game, chill and intense at time. Makes me wish we would stop trying to kill each other and satisfy the rich fuckers and get off this planet and become explorers.

I want very badly to like this game. It's a fascinating terraforming journey, with challenging logistical issues, long-term planning, complex interplay of mechanics, and the pleasure of watching Mars turn from a frozen airless wasteland into a verdant world. It's also a coming-of-age story of a cybernetic intelligence doing the best she can, despite her mission and existence becoming political almost as soon as she booted up. Unfortunately, these experiences are ruined by a pair of game-breaking transport bugs and a painful and easily fixable quality-of-life issue involving storage, which are still unfixed over a year after I reported them despite a much-touted anniversary bugfix update, as well as a host of minor QoL issues. There are also some missed opportunities with story-gameplay interaction, but the transport bugs and storage headache are the real problems. If you do go ahead and buy this game, you need to keep a paranoid eye on your construction projects to make sure progress is actually being made on them. Also, be sure to get the Blue Mars dlc as well as the base game, as many resources will be lost to you without it. Until this game can be relied on to actually build what you order built, I can't recommend it.