Mars Attracts

I have been following Mars Attracts for quite a long time. I remember seeing clips of the game on Reddit well over a year ago, and the trailers and footage made it look like a really fun and quirky take on management sims. As a result, I went into this one looking forward to finally playing it, with quite high hopes.

For the first part of my playthrough, while learning the ropes, I was definitely enjoying myself. I would probably put my enjoyment at around a 7 out of 10 at the end of the first level, if I were to assign a value to it. There are some lovely touches throughout the game, the music fits incredibly well, the animations are well made, the experiments are fun to watch and there is a lot of personality in the presentation.

Unfortunately, my enjoyment deteriorated quite significantly as I got deeper into the Phoenix Park level. The constant very specific objectives changed the way I was playing, and massively reduced the fun for me. Instead of thinking about my park as a whole, I found myself picking whatever objective was currently on screen and working specifically towards completing that. I would finish that objective, another batch would appear, and I would start grinding towards those instead. About two hours into that second level, I finished the objective Build 10 human amenities, and when I saw another set of objectives appear, I simply stopped playing. At that point I would probably put my enjoyment at around a 2 or 3 out of 10, as I felt I hadn’t actually had any freedom in the game in about two hours. I am perfectly happy playing a more old school campaign, and in many cases, I actually prefer having goals to work towards. I would just much rather those goals were broader. I would have loved an opportunity to think for myself and to have broad objectives such as Reach a park capacity of 150 while maintaining 70% guest happiness. I didn't feel like you gave me much freedom at all, and after a few hours, I found my attention wavering and my enjoyment depleting.

I would continue playing Mars Attracts, but at the moment that is more because of the promise of what I think might still be ahead rather than the desire being influenced by what I experienced during these first two missions. I have seen enough footage of the game over the past year or two to know there are things I am still interested in seeing. I just don't think these first few hours captured as much of the charm I had expected from watching those clips.

The change in how I felt across the playthrough is probably the clearest summary of my experience. When I finished the first mission I was still enjoying the game at around a 7 out of 10, although I was not immediately desperate to continue (01:05:24:32). By 01:29:38:52, the constant objectives were starting to wear me down and I still did not feel like I had been given the chance to simply play the game. At 02:39:24:12, I had stopped caring about maintaining the park because completing objectives felt like the only thing that actually mattered. When another batch appeared, I stopped playing at 02:41:32:35

Now, a few days after playing it, I do have the desire to return and play further. I was worn down by the endless objectives, but I didn’t feel the time going by as I played, and I do think there is more good to come.

I should make it clear that while I am familiar with Mars Attacks as an IP, its a while since I’ve seen it. In terms of visual aesthetic, you’ve done an incredible job at capturing the source material. I would need more time with the game to really figure out if the tone and humour has been captured.

Whenever I play these types of park management games, I always go straight for the campaign. I much prefer campaigns over scenarios or sandbox mode, but I do like to have broad goals and not be tied to very specific objectives too tightly.

The first mission was obviously just an intro on how the game works, which is completely understandable. It introduced a lot of game systems without being particularly difficult, and I came away from it reasonably positive.

The length of that first mission felt really good, and by the end I felt sufficiently onboarded (01:05:24:32). I would have liked that to be the end of the onboarding, with Phoenix Park trusting me to use what I had already learned rather than continuing to bombard with more instructions. I appreciate there were a lot more things to learn, but this felt far too constant, and as a result, Phoenix Park is where the objective overwhelm started becoming an issue for me.

Eventually everything else happening in the park started feeling irrelevant. If the objective wanted me to generate 30 fragments, that became what I was doing. If it wanted amenities, that became what I was doing. I wasn't looking around thinking about how I could improve my park. I was looking at the objective and figuring out the quickest way of making it turn green.

After spending around two hours on that one map, I was ready for it to end. I would have loved for the campaign to task me with reaching an overall goal.

The game felt very easy throughout the two missions I played. I never felt at risk of running out of money, becoming unable to progress or building a park that could go bankrupt. As these are clearly early game levels, you give quite a generous starting balance and there's a fairly steady income from donations, which meant I could take a lot of liberties with inefficient layouts, unhappy guests & humans, and pretty poor placement of utilities. I never had to worry about cost, and if my funds did run low, I could just fast forward time as cashflow was always on the rise, so I never felt stressed or panicked due to difficulty, which is always nice.

Individual objectives were also easy to complete. Targets like building X number of Y are easy to complete given there isn’t a time pressure.

The park visitor side missions had slightly more pressure given the time pressure, and I think these are a good touch. I found some aspects of the side objectives difficult to track (eg which amenities has the mayor seen, or does seeing the same experiment twice count as seeing two experiments). I failed one or two of these without understanding why, which I have covered in the video. I also ended up dismissing more of the side missions than I accepted so I could focus on completing the objectives.

I never felt at risk of overall failure. Progression felt good in a sense that I put a lot of time into the game but still ultimately only got to what I assume is very close to the end of level two.

Its tricky to comment too deeply on balance without tens of hours in the game. In the early game, you dont want players to be struggling to build anything. Anything required for the level was either immediately accessible, or accessible after a reasonable amount of time and steps completed (eg unlocking the Egyptian exhibition, or fabricating the Balloon stall), so from that regard, I think you balanced introducing some new structures and higher tier upgrades well.

The only aspect of the balance I would question at the moment is whether there is any real jeopardy at play here. Is the game balanced in such a way that my actions actually have consequences of note? For example, At 00:48:59 I had an angry human and while I liked his little tantrum as he was things in his exhibit, I did not care about any of his red stats because I had enough money to consider replacing him instead or just moving on with other objectives. It didnt really have any consequence. At 01:41:00:53 I could simply fast forward while my cash steadily increased, which made paying 30,000 off the loan easy but not especially fun. By 02:39:24:12 I had a large number of buildings that needed a janitor but it didn't really matter as I just had to focus on placing things to complete objectives. The objectives mattered to progression, while maintaining the park often did not.

Toward the end of my playthrough, I felt it was such a grind that I simply wasn't enjoying it. It wasn't difficult, I just was not having fun. I did not find this with the Two-Point franchise, but I felt it here and I quit without saving. Now that I am writing this a few days later, that desire to return has come back, and I absolutely WILL progress, but after a continual two hour session, I had reached my limit.

As a big fan of management sims, my biggest piece of individual feedback is that I did not find this fun to play for large periods despite really wanting to enjoy it, and being able to appreciate the creativity and artistry on display. The objective spamming reduced my enjoyment over time..

Obviously one of the most important things in a park management game is actually building the park. You have absolutely nailed the controls for building and placing things in Mars Attracts.There is so much I liked about physically building the park that I barely know where to start. Watching walls and other structures being constructed (by the alien drones) is extremely satisfying. Even the little dust cloud particle effect when removing the rocks at the start of Phoenx Park is a nice touch. These little bits of polish give the park building a sense of character, and for me, they added so much charm. The controls, such as middle mouse click to rotate is spot on. The path placement (dragging to place) is super responsive, and not once did I find any sort of issue with placing buildings, or it being unclear why something could not be built or placed. (00:03:03:41 and 00:30:52:58).

Even the smaller placement details are also very well handled. I really liked the way windows automatically rotate to fit walls and how the shader fills the wall around them as it's being built (00:02:06:33).

I made a few silly mistakes, such as placing benches the wrong way around, and not initially realizing that areas could be accessed without a path, but it became quite intuitive over time.

This is highly subjective but IMO, some of the menu icons don't naturally represent the category very clearly. For example, the Facilities icon doesn't scream Facilities to me. For that reason, there are a few times where you’ll see me click two or three icons before finding the one I was looking for.

When a building is not yet unlocked, I would have liked to hover over these and at least see what they were.

I loved the layout of your unlockable tiers for Facilities and Aquisitions.I think its a really neat way of displaying the info and it really captures that RESEARCH aesthetic. A small part of me would suggest that it would make more sense for Tier 1 to be on the bottom and Tier 5 on the top, but thats quite subjective, and overall I think this is a very neat way of laying out these pages.

While I found you generally nailed the controls and interfaces for building the park, I never became particularly attached to the park I was building. I wasn't spending time making areas look better simply because I wanted them to look better, or reorganising things because I had an idea for how I wanted my park to work, and this was again due to the constant objectives pulling my attention towards the next requirement.

I was hoping for rides to be a much bigger part of the demo than they ultimately were (00:17:20:12). With the creativity on display here, I was really looking forward to seeing your take on a selection of rides.

Placing them was very smooth and I again liked being able to rotate them with a mouse click. I would have liked control over the entrance and exit locations, although I appreciate there may be a design reason why that is not available (00:17:59:38).

The need to have a member of staff for every ride was slightly unexpected. It was not necessarily good or bad, but it was not something I expected from the game. I was also surprised when the tutorial explained that janitors keep rides in good condition, as that felt like a slightly odd use of a janitor to me (00:18:37:51).

This was without doubt, the main aspect of the management that I found most frustrating and rather unenjoyable. I still don't know how to delete a pipe or power line, or if its even possible. There are times where I want to build pipes/lines parallel without them joining into the pipes beside them, but they auto join.

A bit more clarity with some of the Utilities visual indicators would be helpful. When its a single pipe/power line connected to a building, the colour system does a good job at representing that a building has either no power, not enough power or sufficient power, but in the Fig 2 above, I dont know why the water generator is red, why the pipes directly next to it are green, then the ones next to them orange, and the last connecting pipes to the objects, red. Visually, that communicated to me that the availability of the resource was reducing as it travelled further from the generator, but I didn't properly understand why that was happening or if that is even correct.

Given money was not really a problem at any point in the game, I just kept building water generators and not over worrying about the layout. It was negatively affecting the park and I chose to ignore it as it was not impacting things enough to prevent progression.

It’s mentioned early on that utilities are unsightly and that they should be kept out of view of guests. It was slightly unclear to me what keeping generators out of the guests' sight actually meant. For example, can they be one tile away from a path but surrounded by decor? Or do they have to be X tiles away to be considered out of sight? At 01:00:07:52 I placed trees in front of a water generator, but I could not tell whether that concealed it or affected how guests viewed the park. If scenery can hide utilities, I think the game needs to communicate when a generator is successfully hidden. Is there a way to select a utility and have an icon, or metric represent whether it is hidden?

I’ll preface this with the fact that I may be simply overlooking it, but as far as I am aware, nowhere on the UI does it indicate to me just how much can be powered by a single generator (eg how many buildings). Am I missing this info on the image above?

I also still don't know how to remove pipes. If there is a way to do so, I very stupidly was unable to figure it out. If there isn't, I would strongly question that decision because my park eventually had pipes everywhere and I had no obvious way to clean them up.

I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life playing games such as SimCity, so resource distribution itself isn't something I inherently dislike. I just didn't enjoy managing it here. There were times, particularly when trying to power the observation post in the Ancient Rome exhibit, where I could see that something was wrong but couldn't clearly understand what the game wanted me to change.

Selecting buildings such as the Security Centre also didn't make it immediately obvious to me how many utility connections they required. I think this whole system could communicate its state much more clearly.

One smaller thing I found odd was selecting a power generator and being given an option to call a janitor. I couldn't understand why that action belonged there.

The exhibits were broadly interesting, but I expected them to be a bit more engaging based on footage and posts I had seen before playing. The humans all seemed to just largely act the exact same, which while I appreciate is probably largely expected if they have the same amenities, I was still a bit let down by the lack of individual character on display.

I didn't feel a huge difference between managing something like the Roman enclosure and the Egyptian enclosure. They obviously look different and have different thematic assets, but I didn't really see anything that showcased any difference in how the humans behaved, how the guests observed the different exhibits, and as far as I could tell, everything is the exact same regarding how staff interact with them, and how scientists experiment on them.

That said, there is a lot I did like regarding the different human exhibits. Just the concept alone is quite fun, and it is exciting to see what era is going to be unlocked next. I liked unlocking decorations and amenities related to each enclosure. They did visually give each enclosure its own identity, and there is clearly plenty of potential here as more periods and content become available.

I think I had expected the humans themselves and the differences between historical periods to become a bigger part of what made each exhibit interesting to manage. Its very possible this is yet to come, and seeing your take on the different eras of humanity is something I would actively look forward to.

The experiment animations are probably my favourite visual part of the game. They are very well animated and I genuinely enjoyed watching them play out.

I expected experiments to be one of the biggest sources of humour in Mars Attracts. Because of that, I was hoping for a large amount of animation variety between different experiments and subjects. The dismemberment experiment, for example, was interesting to watch but felt slightly underwhelming compared with what I had imagined from the premise.

The Expeditions screen was straightforward, although I found the layout slightly messy when I first opened it (00:03:00:41). The concept of storehouses was intuitive (00:08:34:13), and the ability to acquire more humans and decorations worked well and was clearly explained (00:48:16:45). Your onboarding around expeditions/acquisitions as a whole is very well done, and made very clear.

I enjoyed having a little look around at the different guests. Whoever did the pun based names has knocked it out of the park, particularly with Ricky Martian. The names gave the guests some personality, and being able to inspect things such as how much money an individual had in their wallet was a cool little detail that I really enjoyed. I watched guests for a while, and they seemed to interact with quite a few stalls, react to exhibits, and they certainly enjoyed littering. As far as management games like this go, I thought the guests were pretty well done.

I was slightly confused by the guest happiness on a few occasions. I was receiving a lot of complaints from guests about witnessing cruelty despite the tutorial having previously given me the impression that guests enjoyed cruelty. It wasn't clear to me from the UI if guests were unhappy due to too much cruelty or a lack of cruelty, but I think this is more indicative of my misunderstanding than anything else.

The staff management system is very intuitive and clearly laid out. The positive and negative perks are fun to read, and make individual hires feel a bit more meaningful without overcomplicating the overall staff management system. Whoever wrote the traits that appear under the “?” icon on the page for hiring the staff members did a great job. The positive/negative traits are a great touch, even though for the large part, I didn’t overthink those as I always felt I had so much money that it just wouldn't ever be a deciding factor in doing good/bad at this stage of the game.

When selecting a staff member to hire, I would very lightly question why I need to select VIEW before I hire someone given that sometimes I have enough information to make that decision without needing to click in to VIEW them first.

I also was not sure what the highlighted view around a staff member was telling me. My assumption was that it represented the area they would mainly operate within, but I did not feel confident that I had interpreted it correctly (00:09:47:37).

I found hiring staff directly through the relevant building menu much more convenient than going through the dedicated hiring menu at the top of the screen. That route felt much more natural while I was actually managing the park. For example, I can place a hunger stand, and then click it, and hire staff through that. That felt more convenient, but both ways of managing staff are very clear.

The UI was quite understandable throughout. I would broadly break the menus down into the left hand construction menus, the management menus up top, and the menus specific to when a building or character are selected. All menus are generally very well presented, and all are broadly functional.

There were a few individual moments where information either wasn't communicated as clearly as I would have liked or where I initially looked in the wrong place. After finishing the tutorial, for example, I wasn't sure where the character menu was and initially thought it was part of the overlay menu. I find it kind of odd to have a menu specifically dedicated to overlays, and to then have the character menu separate to that. Part of the confusion around the Character menu was that I had not initially realised the elements inside the objective card were buttons. It took me quite a while to recognise them as being interactive (00:22:14:18).

I also did not notice the speed controls until around an hour into the game. I may be misremembering the exact order of the tutorial, but I think the speed toggle was described in relation to the Park Management button before that button had been properly introduced (00:19:11:46).

The loan controls were also slightly confusing visually. The minus button used to pay off the loan was red, which made a positive action look negative. By contrast, I thought the Pricing tab was neat and very easy to understand (01:35:08:20).

One detail I absolutely loved was the way tutorial text is translated as it appears. That's a beautiful little presentation touch.

It would be great if you added a SELECT ALL button. In the screenshot above, I want to add all three humans, and a single button to select them all would be perfect.

In the screenshot above, Im not immediately sure why enclosure walls are blue when placing humans? I assume its the selecting all things related to the specific human in question.

In the screenshots above, a couple of screens like this with the red,yellow, and green highlights feel very Unity. They dont feel as polished as some other aspects of the game and look like a WIP, which they may very well be.Other aspects of your UI as so good that these stood out.

I very stupidly have my input overlay covering the top corner here so I never saw this button, and spent quite some time going back between menus as a result which you will see in the accompanying video.

I am missing the screenshot, but every time the word GUESTS appears on the UI (during dialogue pop ups), it looks like the word QUESTS. I checked this with one other person and they read it as QUESTS too.

Matching the tone of an existing IP is no easy task, but you’ve done a pretty good job on the visuals here. The character animations look great, and as mentioned earlier, the experiment animations in particular were probably my favourite visual element of the game.

The main menu immediately establishes a very particular personality. The little background animations, such as aliens dragging a human across the screen with chains and things travelling through the tubes, are great touches. The menu itself gave me quite comforting mid 2000s game menu vibes. I loved the changing images on the pause menu too. The artwork is great and the menu has this very deliberate older game throwback feeling that suits the game incredibly well.

The music is very fitting throughout. The main menu music immediately gave me extreme Rick and Morty vibes, which actually works quite well with the strange science fiction tone of the game.

More generally, I don't remember having any significant complaints about the audio during the playthrough. I dont recall any instances of audio becoming distracting or any particular element sounding out of place, or that it didnt fit its use case accurately.

One audio issue I noticed was that after I started the acquisition during the early tutorial, I could still hear the tutorial continuing in the background while I was on the Acquisitions screen, though this may be intentional.

Performance was mostly perfect overall. There were a couple of instances where I finished the initial placement of an enclosure and there was about a two second delay before the enclosure actually got placed, though these were on very rare occasions.

I also noticed some instances of screen tearing early in the game so you will see me turn on V Sync quite early in the first level, so I appreciate that option being available.

I failed the mayor's park visit twice initially, largely because he wasn't happy with the aesthetics around the water generators, which was 100% warranted as I was very careless with my placement. I found it quite awkward to track an objective such as keep the mayor's happiness above 70% via the objective UI. You will see timestamped that I failed the mission but didn't have any warning about his happiness approaching 70, and it's not easy see an actual percentage. Similarly when the mayor needed to visit 8 amenities, it was not obvious which of the eight he had visited. Given I had a surplus of funds, I wanted to just build the remaining ones in his path.

I didn't mind failing these side missions as they came around quite regularly, so you'll actually see me dismiss a few of them in a row while I focused on other things in the video.

I really like the fact that these side challenges exist. Having key characters arrive with particular expectations was a nice way to prompt me to think about how the park is designed, or how to use funds over the course of the next few minutes. There is almost no variation with these at the moment, but its a good feature nonetheless, and a clever way of introducing some additional unlockables, such as the hotdog stand.

During the opening of Phoenix Park I had to clear rocks to create space, but it felt quite tacked on and didn't really feel like it naturally fit. In RollerCoaster Tycoon, the limitations of the map can make me think about how to use the space available to me, and sometimes I will accept that I cannot figure out how to make an awkward piece of land work when building a roller coaster for example. Here, clearing the rocks felt like an arbitrary step. I would also have liked to select an area and clear multiple rocks rather than removing them individually. The process felt tedious rather than fun (I will say that the little dust cloud particle effect when you remove the rocks is pretty sweet though) (01:06:43:13).

I loved the traps when they were introduced (01:58:01:11). I’d actively look forward to seeing more traps. These are a wonderful little touch.

This is such an incredibly minor point, and is almost not worth mentioning, but this icon is misaligned. Its slightly lower down than the other icons.

Given there are a lot of different points systems at play, you do a very food job at introducing them, and making it fairly clear what is needed for what. Cash, knowledge, biology points, physics points etc, I think you do a good job at introducing them and onboarding as to why they are needed, and for what.

I would maybe add that the icons representing biology and physics are not immediately recognizable.

If you place a Utility, and connect a pipe/line from it to a building (Eg place a water utility, then connect pipes from it to a toilet), and you then MOVE that utility, it doesn't show the placed pipes, and the generator you are moving cannot be placed on those tiles containing pipes, without visually indicating to you why. This is also inconsistent with normal placement of generators where I can place generators on top of existing pipes.

I opened Phoenix Park before the objective asking me to do so appeared. The objective remained incomplete until I closed and reopened the park (01:22:06:19, 01:30:27:19 and 01:34:40:00).

At 01:31:38:11 I had built food, drink and entertainment stalls, but the objective to build three types of stalls had not been completed. It may have required all three stalls to be staffed, but the objective did not say that.

At 01:36:58:00 the camera became stuck pivoting between two zoom distances. This was caused by the tween animation and was not an input I was making.

At 01:48:58:50 I did not have enough Biology points to start the Dismemberment experiment, but the button remained active. Pressing it only played a failure sound. By comparison, the same button was correctly disabled and displayed INSUFFICIENT SCIENTISTS when I did not have enough scientists.

At 01:50:49:25 the game prompted me to perform a physics experiment after I had already performed several of them.

At 02:10:03:24 I had enough cash to unlock the Mass Abduction expedition, but it remained locked until I changed the focus to Decor and then back to Human.

There were also several moments where objective progress appeared incorrect or was difficult to understand. I failed the Mayor inspection without understanding why (01:33:09:21)

There is a lot about Mars Attracts that I like. Your overall presentation of each piece of the core loop (building placement, staff management, research, expeditions etc) is fairly intuitive, the idea is very unique, and the care put in is very clearly evident. I did have fun with it, particularly during the earlier part of the playthrough, but I didn't find it anywhere near as engaging as the management games I have spent significant amounts of time with over the years, and in all honestly, it fell short of my expectations. I have played endless hours of SimCity, Zoo Tycoon, Stronghold and, more recently, RollerCoaster Tycoon. What keeps me playing those games is that I am usually working towards a larger problem while constantly making my own smaller decisions about how to solve it.

That is what I felt was missing here. Phoenix Park increasingly became a sequence of instructions. Complete one objective, receive another, concentrate on that, complete it and repeat. Eventually I wasn't really thinking about whether I was building a good park anymore. I was thinking about what I needed to do to make the next objective turn green.I would much rather be given broader objectives and trusted to work out how to achieve them. Give me a capacity target, a happiness requirement, a financial target or some combination of those things, and then let all of these management systems become the tools I use to get there.

I would continue playing Mars Attracts. At the moment, though, that is primarily because I still want to find the game that originally caught my attention in all those clips and trailers. There are enough good ideas here that I want to see what comes next, but after more than two and a half hours, I don't think the game had quite delivered on that promise for me yet though I am confident it will, and I will be returning to it as a player.

The accompanying playtest video will be added here when available.

1. 0:00:00:00Comment

   General introduction and mention the nice art.

2. 00:02:06:33Comment

   I really like how the windows rotate to fit the walls and how the shader fills the walls.

3. 00:03:03:41Comment

   Path building is super smooth.

4. 00:03:50:23Comment

   I initially interpreted the arrow as showing which way the bench was facing, so you can see me placing them the wrong way around.

5. 00:05:00:37Comment

   Thank you for supporting V Sync.

6. 00:05:42:47Comment

   Keeping generators out of the guests' sight is fine, but it is not clear exactly what that means. On the same point, the generators and pipes were probably one of my least favourite aspects of the overall game.

7. 00:08:34:13Comment

   I thought the concept of the storehouses was quite intuitive.

8. 00:09:32:28Comment

   I much preferred this method of hiring staff.

9. 00:09:47:37Comment

   I am still not sure what this view is telling me. Is it showing that he will operate mostly within this area?

10. 00:10:23:59Comment

    GUESTS looks like QUESTS. I verified this with someone else too.

11. 00:12:05:48Comment

    Here, I wanted to see whether Observation Posts had to be placed inside an enclosure or on flat, non-dirt land.

12. 00:13:58:06Comment

    Pipes. The most confusing aspect of the game.

13. 00:15:35:01Comment

    I liked the HIRE screen and found it quite intuitive.

14. 00:16:17:15Comment

    This is where I first learn about research points. I really do not think the icons for these are clear.

15. 00:16:51:34Comment

    This is the first experiment I witnessed. I found it really lacklustre, given that this was what I had been most looking forward to.

16. 00:17:20:12Comment

    I am going to point out again that I read this text as QUESTS rather than GUESTS. I also thought rides would be a much bigger part of the demo, but they just were not.

17. 00:17:59:38Comment

    Placing rides is very smooth, and again, I love being able to rotate them with a mouse click. Is there a reason why we cannot control the entrance and exit locations? The need to have a staff member for each ride felt slightly unexpected. It was not necessarily good or bad, but it was not something I expected from the game.

18. 00:18:37:51Comment

    This overlay telling me that janitors keep rides in good condition was also unexpected. That seems like an odd use of a janitor.

19. 00:19:11:46Comment

    I could be misremembering this part, but you mention the speed toggle being beside the Park Management button. Had the Park Management button been introduced at this stage? I did not notice the speed button until about an hour later.

20. 00:22:14:18Comment

    At this point, I am trying to complete the first objective, but I interpreted the Character menu as meaning a Character section within the Overlay menu because the actual Character menu had not been introduced to me. I also had not noticed the buttons within the objective card itself. It took me quite a while to realise they were buttons.

21. 00:26:06:55Comment

    This works pretty seamlessly, but I found it quite awkward to have as a specific tutorial instruction, mainly because of how I had built my path around the park. I understand that you are looking to introduce the concept of freedom. I just do not think this needed its own tutorial point and feel it could have been mentioned when initially placing the enclosure.

22. 00:30:52:58Comment

    I just want to say again that placement feels very smooth. The grid snapping is spot on, and I do not recall a single instance across my 2.5 hours where placement felt awkward in any way. The only issue was removing utility lines.

23. 00:32:54:58Comment

    My number one dislike with the game was managing the utilities. I did not find it intuitive, largely because the game does not communicate why a grid cannot power something and because removing pipes and lines does not seem to be implemented.

24. 00:34:54:50Comment

    Is there a reason why I have to select VIEW for each potential hire? Can I just hire them instead of needing to click through to the next screen and then hire them?

25. 00:36:33:31Comment

    Watching the experiment animations play out was quite fun. If you asked me what I was most looking forward to in the game, I would say it was seeing these. That said, they still lacked enough variation to make them really enjoyable. I also liked the animation of the humans eating from the trough. That was very well done. There is a lot of creativity at play here, and I thought you did a great job with it. I would have loved to have been given the freedom to explore this more.

26. 00:41:36:05Comment

    You are about to see me build some toilets and become very confused about why the pipes are suddenly a mixture of green, orange and red.

27. 00:43:31:08Comment

    Related to the point above, I am becoming frustrated by the fact that I cannot simply delete pipes. You can see the mess created by the pipes automatically joining and my inability to remove them. I am becoming increasingly aware of the mission, and you will see me fail it in a few seconds. I was not sure why I failed, as it was not clearly communicated to me.

28. 00:48:16:45Comment

    The ability to acquire more humans and decorations through Expeditions is cool. It works well and is clearly explained.

29. 00:48:59:00Comment

    Here, I have an angry human. I quite liked his little tantrum, but I did not care about any of his stats. Given the surplus of cash, I was considering simply acquiring additional humans if he continued causing a fuss.

30. 00:52:40:40Comment

    It was almost an hour into the game when I realised that I had not actually looked around the map. It is quite simple, but I like the surrounding landscape. It is visually well done.

31. 01:00:07:52Comment

    Here, I place some trees in front of the water generator. It is not clear whether things like this affect how guests view the park. An earlier UI message mentions that generators are unsightly, but it is not clear whether this type of approach successfully hides them.

32. 01:05:24:32Comment

    I finished the first mission here. The mission length felt really good. I definitely took longer than most players probably would, but I had fun, with the exception of the utilities. At this point, I would rate my enjoyment at around 7 out of 10. I was not at a point where I felt compelled to continue playing, so I stopped and left the game for a while. I had seen some interesting things, but nothing had really gripped me or made me feel like rushing to Steam to purchase it. This was unexpected, as I remember mentioning the game to my wife after seeing it on Reddit last year and saying that it looked incredible. I felt sufficiently onboarded at this point and would have liked this to be the end of the onboarding.

33. 01:06:43:13Comment

    Again, I love the art style used for the menus here.

34. 01:08:11:00Comment

    I would have liked to have been able to select an area for this. It was tedious, not fun and, in my opinion, added nothing to the game.

35. 01:11:53:59Comment

    Give an overview of how I am now more familiar with the game. I hope you can see much better quality gameplay from my perspective and better management of the utilities.

36. 01:22:06:19Comment

    You can see me open the park before the objective asking me to do so appears on screen.

37. 01:29:07:34Comment

    Again, the objective asks the Mayor to witness eight amenities. Is there a way to see specifically which amenities he has witnessed? I can infer the total number from the circle on the UI, but I cannot see which ones he has visited. If I knew that, I could simply pause the game and place the remaining amenities along his path.

38. 01:29:38:52Comment

    Around this time, I was starting to become quite tired of the constant barrage of objectives. An hour and a half into the game, I still had not been given a chance to simply play it. Every action felt forced.

39. 01:30:27:19Bug

    BUG. You can see that the top objective is to OPEN THE PARK, but the park is already open. To complete the objective, I had to close and reopen the park. This appears to happen if you open the park before the objective appears. I do this at 01:34:40:00.

40. 01:31:38:11Bug

    BUG. I have built three stalls at this point. You can see food, drink and entertainment stalls, but the objective is not complete. I think the objective might require them to be staffed too, but it does not say that.

41. 01:33:09:21Bug

    I am about to fail the MAYOR INSPECTION mission here, and I have no idea why I failed it. Could this be a bug?

42. 01:34:40:00Comment

    This is where you can see me close and reopen the park to complete the objective.

43. 01:35:08:20Comment

    The loan controls are slightly confusing to read. The MINUS button is red, which implies something negative, but it is used to pay off the loan, which is a positive action. I found this less intuitive than it needed to be. By contrast, the PRICING tab is very neat and easy to understand.

44. 01:36:58:00Bug

    BUG. Here, you can see that zooming the camera out causes it to become stuck pivoting between zooming in and out because of the tween animation. I am not causing this movement in the clip.

45. 01:41:00:53Comment

    Here I fast-forward the game. This is a really great feature, and I would be likely to use it frequently. I had a nice setup where, although I did not have a large cash surplus, my balance steadily increased if I simply waited. For that reason, completing the PAY OFF 30,000 FROM YOUR LOAN objective was fairly easy. I will say that this particular objective was not fun.

46. 01:48:58:50Bug

    BUG. Even though I do not have enough Biology points to START AN EXPERIMENT, the game allows me to press the button. By comparison, if I do not have enough scientists, the button is disabled and displays INSUFFICIENT SCIENTISTS. You can see me select DISMEMBERMENT and press the button to start the experiment, but I only hear a failure sound. I do this two or three times before realising what is happening.

47. 01:50:49:25Comment

    Here, the game prompts me to perform a physics experiment after I have already performed several physics experiments.

48. 01:58:01:11Comment

    I loved the traps.

49. 02:10:03:24Bug

    BUG. I have enough cash to unlock MASS ABDUCTION, but it remains locked. You can see that it unlocks after I change the FOCUS to DECOR and then back to HUMAN.

50. 02:39:24:12Comment

    Here, you can see that I had many buildings and structures requiring a janitor, but I simply did not care because the game wanted me to complete objectives rather than actually maintain the park. At this point, I was not having fun at all. When I completed the remaining objectives and another batch appeared, I realised that I was done. It simply was not fun.

51. 02:41:32:35Comment

    I ended the playtest here because I had no desire to continue.

52. 02:41:58:51Comment

    Final thoughts.

Thank you for letting me playtest Mars Attracts! Its always a pleasure getting to see what games are being made. The talent on display here is easy to see, and I wish you the very best. I am trying to get my own free review service off the ground, so if you found this and/or the two hour video useful, filling out the form, and permission to list your game would be incredibly valuable

Stephen Long | Indie Game Booster