Back in 2018, Haemimont Games released a city building colony sim game, Surviving Mars. Set entirely on Mars, players build thriving ecosystems and bustling colonies. The game received generally positive reviews at the time and also had several DLCs to bolster the gameplay. The developers released the last DLC in 2022. Though the game’s big updates ended there, Survival Mars left it’s impact on the city simulation genre. Though I personally have not played, my partner remembers spending hours on end watching his colonies grow.
Surviving Mars: Relaunched is a relaunched version of this classic game. Developed by the same company, Haemimont Games and also published by the same company, Paradox Interactive, the game was released on November 10th, 2025. This relaunched version comes with all the previous DLCs, improved visuals and UI, a new political system and various quality of life updates. Surviving Mars: Relaunched offers five tutorials to learn the basics, a standard campaign mode, a creative mode with some creative limitations and 33 challenges to attempt. Though city building games aren’t my go-to genre, I found quite a lot to appreciate in Surviving Mars: Relaunched! The developers did decent job at walking through but not hand-holding players into the gameplay aspects. Though I wouldn’t say my colonies ever reached the point of “thriving”, I still had an enjoyable time managing them. So, gather your drones, its time to discuss Surviving Mars: Relaunched!
The Pre-Game Aspects: Tutorials and Pre-customization
The five tutorials in this game cover a variety of the basic functions. This includes things like camera control, placing items on the map, the machinery such as drones and rovers, domes and colonists and research. Each tutorial goes into some depth for their relative topics. It took me an hour or two just to complete these alone. Once completed, players then have the option to try out a standard campaign mode, creative mode or one of the 33 challenge campaigns to play. Campaigns seem like the original gameplay—a race against other colonies to see who can complete the most objectives to earn points. These objectives are milestones for colonies, such as discovering water, having an increasing number of colonists and improving the environment on mars.
Creative mode follows along this same gameplay, but makes things a lot easier for the player. It provides additional funding, near unlimited resources and makes other elements such as rockets and research faster. It is a good way to test things out and see if your creations would work, without having to go through a standard campaign. Achievements are disabled in this mode, so keep that in mind.
Before jumping into a standard or creative campaign, you are allowed to change various mission set up options. This can include things like the mission sponsor, which determines starting funding and other money factors, your commander profile, which provides some passive skills for your colony, and various game rules to add a challenge or make this easier. You can also edit your initial cargo rocket and your landing location. What I really appreciated during this was the changing challenge percent. This will increase or decrease as you select different options. If you want a beginner-friendly experience, choosing a difficulty between 100% and 120% is your best bet. However, if you wanted a super challenge to test your skills, I’ve seen percentages go up and beyond 300%. I can certainly appreciate a game that allows the player to decide how difficult it will be.
The Gameplay Part 1: First Steps on Mars
As mentioned before, the developers set up the game in a way that introduces players to basic concepts, but still has more to discover as you play. As I started my first game, I had a general understanding of what I needed to do, but could already see on the HUD much more I was unfamiliar with. I want to quickly add that one thing I really do appreciate is the inclusion of not only the encyclopedia, which explains various gameplay elements in simple sentences, but also the fact that hovering over almost everything gave you some information about the item. There are also optional gameplay hints, but these are kind of rehashes of what was already explained in the tutorials. Still, with all my existing knowledge and some I was unsure about, I took my first steps onto Mars.
Or should I say, my drones and rovers drove out onto Mars. Typically, drones and rovers will begin your colony and serve as its backbone. Drones are ever helpful machines that harvest resources such as metal, unload rockets and carry resources around and also perform maintenance and construction. It was enjoyable in the beginning to watch them stroll about, carrying out the various tasks I assigned to them. Rovers are a bit different in that different types of rovers will perform different duties. Explorers will examine anomalies which provide benefits such as research points. Commanders control small groups of drones and can transport them to new areas. I will say that most of the time, at least in the beginning, the rovers would perform a task here and there before sitting idly in my colony with not much to do, while my drones did all the manual labor.
The first steps you’ll probably want to do are gather nearby resources and start setting up various systems such as power and water. Commonly, the first resources you will encounter are metal and concrete, which can be gathered and/or mined from ground. Icons are always visible for where a deposit is, which is nice when it comes to planning the layout. If you can see a nearby concrete to the left of your rocket, it might be a good idea to start setting up power on the left as well. Power lines and water/oxygen pipes will need to placed down as well, so it is important to take this into consideration as you begin your layout of the land.
Once you’ve gathered a decent amount of resources, it might be time to consider placing down your first dome. All domes require power, water, oxygen and eventually food in order to keep your colonists alive and well. When placing your first dome, it might be best to place it close to the initial rocket’s landing location. Drones are not the fastest and though you can speed time up, I found myself waiting half a sol just for them to finish. Domes require buildings within to keep your colonists happy. This includes things like living accommodations, a grocery or some sort of food source, recreational facilities and decorations to keep them happy, and it’s probably a good idea to put a few productive things like research or medical facilities as well. Ideally, a decent bit of this should be pre-build before you land your first colonists, or aka, your founders.
The Gameplay Part 2: Second Steps on Mars
When your dome is built and your life needs are flowing, it is time to order the first passenger ship. This ship will serve as your founders ship, which will be your first colonists on Mars. This is important because once they have landed, the founder stage begins. During this stage, no additional colonists can be sent to your colony until the end of the stage in 10 sols, or if a child is born. It is super important that you keep your founders alive as it will determine if your colony is livable. If all of your founders die during this stage, it is considered a game over and your mission will end. However, if you’ve done proper planning and resource management, it would be more difficult to have a death than to keep them alive and well.
When you order a passenger ship, you decide who will be invited to live on the Red Planet. Applicants have differing aspects such as specializations, perks, flaws and quirks. I believe the first set of colonists should have a decent split in specializations, though future ones can focus more so in one area or another. In my gameplay, I was aiming to make Mars greener and more inhabitable. So, I went with more scientists and botanists later on. Applicants can have perks, flaws, and quirks that appear as randomized traits. These include things like being religious, sexy, a gamer, vegan, or composed, among many other possibilities. Colonists can have up to three traits. Invite only those you deem qualified, since space is limited on the ship and in your colony’s early stages.
Another important initial aspect to consider is research. You gain research passively each sol, and you can boost it in several ways. Research is the main way to unlock new technologies and or great passive buffs to your colony. It is divided into seven different categories. These include engineering, robotics, physics, biotech, social, recon & expansion, terraforming and also a rare breakthrough category as well. Each category has many different research potentials which will unlock as you complete previous ones. There are some researches that are essential, but after a while you can begin to dive deep into specific areas. It is important to always be researching something to keep your colony and technologies up to date.
The Gameplay Part 3: Third Steps & Beyond
Another important gameplay aspects to consider are sector discovering and the newly added politics factor. The game begins in a single sector, and you must discover outside sectors to expand. Like research, you can queue sectors for discovery, which then progress passively over time. Exploring new sectors reveals additional resources and anomalies, while building sensor towers boosts the speed of discovery.
New to Surviving Mars: Relaunched, politics will also play a factor early on as well. In standard and creative campaigns, you compete against computer-controlled colonies racing to complete milestones. Maintaining good standing within the group is essential. Every two sols, the council will meet and vote on laws and regulations that all factions must follow. These include things like society regulations, better sponsor relations or even the ability to skip the founder stage. This also gives you a slight hint at how the competition is doing.
Since I haven’t played the first Surviving Mars, I’m unsure whether politics significantly shaped its core gameplay mechanics. I’m leaning more towards them being a slight boon, or small factor. I tended to forget about which laws were in place after leaving the politics screen. Beyond the skipping founder stage, the boons they provide are nice, but nothing that will determine how well a colony thrives in the long run. I guess overall, it’s a nice little addition for the launch, without the feeling that it takes over gameplay completely.
Beyond all that I just listed, there’s still so much more that exists within Surviving Mars: Relaunched. Eventually, things like wonder building and terraforming will play key roles as you expand your colonies. A milestone such as 1000 colonists is achievable and the number of people living in your colony will continue to grow as Martian-born children, or children born on Mars, will make up future generations. Different weather effects can occur which will require players to act quickly to preserve their colony’s life. Again, I appreciate the inclusion of gameplay hints and the encyclopedia to explain these aspects to me, but trying to take a crash course all at once might be a bit much. It is probably better to discover different aspects as they occur over time, as you and your colonies discover Mars in the process.
Once you’ve had your fill of the standard and creative campaigns, don’t forget about the 33 challenges available. These challenges start you off in pre-existing campaigns with a limited time in order to achieve specific goals. The difficulty on these range from varying challenge percentages as the pre-determined factors will play a heavy hand in how you are to accomplish the goals.
The Graphics & Audio: Life on the Red Planet
Just wanted to take a quick moment to discuss the graphics and audio. To start with, despite the surface of Mars probably not being the most pleasing to look at in real life (red, rocky, and rather bland), I found this game to be visually pleasing. Once you get your colony growing and expanding, it ends up being a space-mechanic wonder. I’ve already mentioned before enjoying the scene of my drones performing tasks, but the other mechanical objects were pleasing and felt realistic as well. Nothing felt too “out of this world” that made me think that the game was diving headfirst into sci-fi, despite the game being about building a colony on Mars. The graphics are also not too intense that you would need a computer from NASA in order to play. For what it is, it’s super pleasing to me.
The sounds in this game also fall along the same positive outlook for me. I really enjoyed the different sound effects in the game. I especially enjoyed zooming in and out of the map and how this changed what you heard. For example, my own headset vibrated with the intensity of the rockets as they landed. Sounds of life activity played whenever I zoomed the camera inside of a dome. I enjoy these details in sound and that it isn’t just the same music playing over and over again. Of course, there is background music, which isn’t bad at all! However, it’s the type that might get a bit stale over time, despite the radio function to change it, and I would probably end up listening to my own tunes. Regardless, both graphics and audio receive a A from me.
The Concerns: A Few Bugs, Hopefully Squashed with Updates
Currently, Surviving Mars: Relaunched sports a Mixed review rating on Steam. A decent bit of the reviews claim that this relaunched version is sadly just the exact same as the original. This includes some existing bugs. In my gameplay, I did run into two issues, one minor bug and one potentially bigger bug.
The first one is small. After reloading my save, I saw that my colonies name and logo—Eatin’ Greens with the brussel spout icon—was changed to some generic thing. This was was probably one of the random potential initial names when starting a new game. Again, it’s not a major issue and I was able to edit it back to what I set it as, but it is a bug nonetheless.
The bigger bug I may have came across occurred while I was trying to build a dome. As a disclaimer, this could just be user error and if it is, please let me know in the comments! When ordering some of my drones to work on a dome I was building, it kept popping up with an error saying “can’t find the required resources.” I believe this resource was concrete, which was located not too far from where my dome placement was.
Even after I manually went in and ordered these drones to pick up the concrete and then deliver it to the dome, they would deliver one piece before going back to mining metal. Other drones were able to deliver concrete just fine, so I wasn’t sure why only a few seemingly had this problem. Again, could just be user error, but if it is a bug, it’s a pretty important one that affects gameplay.
With the relaunched version, I expect future updates to patch the bugs the game will receive. In 2026, the DLCs Feeding the Future and Machine Utopia will add major updates to the game. Much like us players with our colonies, the developers will need to continue working on the game in order to expand its fanbase and longevity.
The Conclusion: Life on Mars, Is It Possible?
Overall, I had a fun time trying to make my colonies thrive on Mars. Despite my shortcomings and failed attempts, it was enjoyable to test out new ideas and settings. A full standard campaign will probably take a few hours to complete, even on the highest in-game speed setting. The many different campaign options, along with the 33 challenges, provides longevity. Players may spend many weeks on end, if not longer, to complete everything. Surviving Mars: Relaunched packs in a wide range of gameplay elements. It demands a certain level of strategy that makes even the easiest settings (maybe not creative mode) an enjoyable challenge.
I believe the developers at Haemimont Games made a great decision in relaunching the original Surviving Mars. Many reviews claim that the game is too similar to the original. However, I think this should be obvious given that it is a “relaunch.” The game isn’t designed as a sequel to the original. Instead, it serves to bring the game more up-to date with modern gaming, running on more advanced engines. It is a relaunching on the game’s life and for that, I think it is doing it’s job well. Plus, with future DLCs, the game will hopefully continue to be worked on and improved. I can see a bright future ahead of Surviving Mars: Relaunched, and a bright future for life on Mars!
Thank you for reading and best of luck to your colonies!
