Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars is a city-building survival game that takes place on Mars and is modeled after real Martian data. The player chooses a sponsoring nation and a commander profile, each conferring slightly different benefits, a unique building and vehicle. Possible sponsors include an International Mars Mission, the United States, Europe, India, China, Russia, and fictional organizations such as the Blue Sun Corporation, SpaceY, the Church of the New Ark, and Paradox Interactive. A rocket filled with resources, drones, prefabricated buildings, and Mars rovers lands on a selected location and prepares the basic infrastructure.

The only resources that may be found on the surface or extracted from underground are metals, rare metals, concrete, water and sometimes polymers, all other resources (food, fuel, machine parts, electronics, power, oxygen) must be manufactured or imported. Money is only used for transactions between the colony and the sponsor, and is generated mainly from exports of rare metals. There is a technology tree divided in five categories: physics, engineering, social, biotechnology, and robotics. The game can generate natural disasters such as dust storms, meteor storms, cold waves, and dust devils.

Haemimont Games, developers of the Tropico 5 game, initially led the game's development. The initial idea was to make a game set in outer space, and they soon realized that the setting and gameplay would be very different if the game was set on Mars, the Moon or Venus. Eventually they decided to use Mars as a result of the Mars race. The team studied the real-world challenges that scientists consider when thinking about colonizing Mars.

These challenges were then translated into gameplay elements for the game. To do so, the developers sought to find a balance between the complexity of the real-world science and the more simplified nature of gameplay. CEO Gabriel Dobrev cited as an example the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment, or "MOXIE", a device that can generate breathable oxygen from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. Regardless of its internal working, when it was adapted into gameplay it became just a box that, once plugged, generates an in-game resource.

The game received generally favorable reviews according to review aggregator website Metacritic, scoring 80% on PC Gamer, and 78/100 on IGN.

Alongside Cities: Skylines and Frostpunk, the game helped to gain new popularity for the city-building game genre, which was in decline since the failure of the 2013 reboot of the SimCity series. With the SimCity franchise no longer producing new games, smaller developers had a chance to provide more creative games. Shams Jorjani from Paradox Interactive said: "Things that aren’t big enough for the biggest publishers, are big enough for us, and Cities [Skylines] is an example of that. Those publishers find greener pastures, and that leaves space for us to grow." In particular, Surviving Mars provided an increased complexity to the genre, as unlike previous games bad decisions of the player can cause them to lose the game.