MARS SIMULATOR - RED PLANET

Mars Simulator is somewhat more game-like than Take on Mars (TKOM), and within the limits imposed by the user interface, easier to play. Landing is especially difficult as the lander does not respond well to the key commands. When you start the actual landing, get on the W and D keys immediately or you won't make it to the target zone. My only other complaint is that the rover moves far too fast to be realistic and you must do all the driving; there's no instruction programming interface as there is in TKOM. There is no manual and no instructions other than what appear on the screen as you play, so I've extracted them, slightly edited, from the game files. The capsule carrying the rover has entered the Martian atmosphere. Prepare to land the capsule safely in the landing zone using the arrow keys or the W,A,S and D keys to steer the capsule towards the landing zone. When the capsule is close enough to the ground, open the parachute with the spacebar. When you have control of the r...

With a title like Mars Simulator, you would expect a simulation of Mars. Alas, Planetbase or Sol 0 do a far better job of simulating the red planet. John Carter of Mars did a better simulation. The game thinks so little of its subject matter that it relies on fantasies of alien artifacts and glowing crystals to stretch the content beyond 4 missions. The lexicon is limited to a short list of statistics, condensed from Wikipedia. The mars rover, the star of the show, doesn't handle as well as my lawn mower. But it does have the same navigational system. Scratch that - with my lawn mower, I can at least follow my tracks. Imagine the thrill of exploring Mars without a sense of direction (no compass) or location (strategic map looks like a square of sandpaper, with blots). Where is south? Which blot is that cliff wall? But now I am just getting snarky. If you must buy this, wait until the price goes down to, say, $1.50 Cdn.

Could be an awesome game. Sadly, I already have issues upon starting the game, despite I haven't tried and played the game as of yet (which I won't do either). The game starts in German actually, and menu opens in English. Graphical settings won't allow me to go to my native resolution of 1920*1080 for my monitor, it's max is 1600*1050.... If you want to play this at a native resoultion above 1600*1050 good luck's wishes, you won't. Now the game itself: Pro's: - Graphics are alright - Controls are neat - Surroundings and actions look nice - Missions are nice too Con's: - Resolution changing - Voice acting (if it's not just a text-to-speech thing) - Driving is slidey - Feels like it's ripped off from somewhere (don't know, just the feeling)

bad...

I played the intro to the game, where you are attempting to land your rover in the correct landing zone. The first time, I missed the landing zone so I tried again. This time, I positioned my shadow dead center of the target and still missed. when I restarted again, the ground turned white and my computer lagged like crazy. This game is filled with little things that degrade the overall quality of it. First, the graphics are not great, 32 bit + bad animation didn't make the game amazing. The menu screen is very bad; it looks like what you'd normally play on an arcade machine, not a game you spent 8 dollars on. Second, this game is incredibly underwhelming. Knowing that an 8 dollar game usually meant that the game was good, coupled with the not so bad intro video, I had high hopes going into it. Then I was greeting with bad graphics, a menu screen that looks completely 2D and looked like it was made back when computers were the size of bookshelves, and some not so great game play, with ...