Per Aspera is a slog that attempts to insert a cliche story through painfully bad dialogue that is poorly delivered. The game lacks motivating progression and meaningful strategy. One of the selling points was how people boasted of the story in the game. I found it to be a weak copy of a slew of games that came out with the exact same premise. This is only made worse, being an overplayed cliche story, by the very poorly written dialogue and even worse delivery. I eventually downloaded a mod from the workshop that removed much of the dialogue, as it was putting me on the edge of quitting the game. The layout and design of the game is interesting at first glance, but lacks any meaningful reasoning or logic. There is an attempt to insert variety by the addition of research locations, but they tend to be more shallow and meaningless than is worth the effort. By the end, I only finished it to get the achievement. The only positive that I have about the game is also the biggest setb...

A fine enough game, though it has the primary problem that it's core gameplay is just not that fun. So the game has a ton of stuff in it, but it is all built on this shaky foundation of plonk some simple structures down, plonk a worker down, and wait 5 minutes for it to slowly build out the new addition to your base. Even in the late late game, this basic formula does not change. You are still using the same factories and mines, they are still transporting resources the same way, building new additions is still as slow as it is at the start of the game. Compare this to something like Factorio or Mindustry, where how you interact with the world changes dramatically as you scale up and get more technology and resources. Charitably, you could say that Per Aspera is a meditative game of creating these bonsai like growths across the surface of Mars. Less charitably, you could point out that there is very little pushback at any point during this game, and you can solve most problems ju...

Entertaining mechanics and a cool concept around AI and terraforming. But it lacks depth and eventually feels grindy and bloated. Starts strong, but loses steam.

I found it to be a pretty good game! I'm a fan of sci-fi and space, so my review might be biased, but hey it's my review! I like the setting, the fact that you are the AI behind the recolonization of Mars, the choices you need to make, etc; but the RTS aspect is fairly light. Once you get access to military research, you're "forced" to take some research points into military research, but it could be removed with little to no impact on gameplay. This game's focus is resource management, not drone wars. The game's pacing gets odd at the end of Stage 3, where you need to start adding water and greenery to the planet. You get to a point where everything takes a long while and depends on your research capability and the number of spaceports you have. Pro tip: If you want to avoid headaches, deplete nodes in flood zones ASAP and then recycle them before adding water to Mars. I had to relocate a huge chunk of my production by ignoring flood zones. The game also seems to be offering multi...

4/5

I love space, I love science fiction, I’ve read tons of books about the terraforming of Mars. And yet, this game is the most boring piece of crap you could ever buy.

Great Yes

Awesome game. Pretty difficult, but worth it. Great story too. Definitely recommend.

A hackneyed story that plays most of the genre's tropes completely straight, and not for the better. This, on top of a shallow management game? Not worth it.

chill building game, interesting story - never figured out how to make Mars green.