Playing Per Aspera – a strategy game where you terraform Mars. Almost done with it, and it's rather underwhelming. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty and it's practically impossible to lose so long as you aren't totally inept. Enemies (the scarce few that are actually in the game, barely worth mentioning, really) are braindead and will be instantly wiped from the map the moment they appear, and the resource management is kind of pointless as there's resources out the ass all around, the only difficulty being actually getting to them – which, in itself, is just a waiting game, really.
There's a tech tree and special projects and building upgrades and stuff like that, but all of it is so simplistic and shallow that it's not really worth mentioning. Make numbers go higher so that you can upgrade buildings to make other numbers go higher. Given the absence of challenge, it doesn't really play a role.
The only thing the game has going for it is the theme, as they clearly try to be a little in-depth about the whole terraforming stuff. It's still pretty game-y and simplified, of course, but it's got some neat things like manually affecting the atmosphere and its pressure, etc. There's also the story, but it's dogshit garbage clearly written by uninspired hacks, so it's best to just ignore it.
I do not recommend it to anyone, unless you have a severe itch for resource management strategy game AND are really into the whole terraforming Mars idea. And even then, you won't be returning to this game after you finish it.
