The Epic Games Store is presented every week a free game, which you can add to your library without adding. This week’s offer is Surviving Mars, the spatial city builder game about … surviving on Mars. It will be available until March 18.
Surviving Mars, if you have not played it yet, is more or less exactly what you suggest if you think Cities: Skylines go to space. Your goal is to create a sustainable outpost on Mars. You do this by obtaining resources (metal, concrete, etc.) to build life support structures (food, water, oxygen, energy) to support domes of different sizes that can house human life. If you like it Cities, will you want Surviving Mars, too. (Both games are published by Paradox Interactive.)
Other than Cities, although, Surviving Mars sit an additional focus on people, rather than structures. You can compile the manifesto for each rocket you send from Earth to Mars. Each person you can choose from is randomly generated, according to their characteristics and occupations. Do you want a bunch of alcoholic botanists who like to play video games? Or what about hypochondriac party animals exercising 25 hours a day? In your version of Mars, anything is possible.
At its core, Surviving Mars understand that good urban planning is not just about roads and buildings and budget cuts. It’s about people. Funny that one has to go to space to learn the lesson.
Killer tunes out there too.
In other “games you can get for free” news, Metro 2033 is currently available at a 100 percent discount on the other PC Store Window, the name named after a 19th-century energy source. It will remain at that price until March 15.
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