Ever since I was little I was really fascinated by the universe and space. I bought myself a cheap little telescope to watch the moon and stars with. Even to this day I really enjoy it. I stayed up to watch the launch of Crew Dragon and got to see Mars really clear with the naked eye recently. One of my favorite books and movies is The Martian. So I hope Mars Horizon can give me a worth will experience.

Space race the game with extras

You start the game by choosing from 5 different agencies, NASA, the Soviet Union, who were in the center of the space race, and ESA, China, and Japan who didn’t partake. Each has its own bonuses that help you reach your goals. But don’t worry you can customize every agency to have all the perks you would like if you so choose to. You can even remove them all to have more of a challenge. Mars Horizon’s gameplay is turn-based with resource managing, earn support, money, etc to make your way to the top of the industry.

This is a real space race. All the different agencies will be racing to complete the milestone missions first. These milestone missions are in theory the story missions you need to complete to advance your space program. Finishing first will grant increased support. The higher the support the more funds you get which is vital for the fast progression of your agency. Then there are requests, which are side-missions. They are available for a limited time and are ways to boost your support and science. The more science points you have the faster you’ll be able to unlock new technology.

This research is done with a tree-like system. There are 3 kinds of research trees: Missions, buildings, and vehicles. Each cost time and science points so spent your point wisely to come out on top of the competition. The buildings will also cost time and money to build and retain.

It takes risks to become the number one

Choose the best parts for building your rocket. Each part has its own stats. Better parts cost more money. If you have a heavy payload for instance you need to have a more powerful booster. When designing each rocket, launch reliability will be a big factor. This displays the chances of a successful launch. The launch day will also make the launch easier or hard depending on the conditions. This offers high risk vs reward to be the first to complete the mission.

The game doesn’t contain any multiplayer which is a bummer, because who wouldn’t want to do the space race against your friends. Because it all plays out turn-based there is not much action happing. This is more a casual slower based take on the genre. The missions can get a bit repetitive as well. The campaign is rather long but does not really scream for multiple playthroughs. There isn’t any interesting character to connect to, no need to train your astronauts or anything like that.

Graphics and controls

The game controls like a lazy PC port. You control the cursor of the game with the left stick. This makes the game feel really slow and tedious to click on everything. This goes for the menus as well as in-game itself. This is the easiest way to port a game without putting in much effort. There are some buttons they put in place to excess some parts of the menu more easily but it’s clear that the game wasn’t designed around console play.

The graphics of the game are pretty bad. In the menus you won’t notice. But whenever you are out of the menu’s you are greeted by some really poor models. Your spaceport is the place where you add all your buildings. But to be completely honest, it looks horrible. It’s also almost impossible to place buildings in your spaceport because the control stick is way too sensitive around these grid-like patterns.

Conclusion

If you’re big into resource management games and space exploration this might be fun for you. If you played the plethora of better resource management games that are already out there and you want to play a new game, that you can pick this one up. It is hard to suggest it to any other player because of the lackluster performance, last-gen graphics, and underwhelming gameplay.

6/10

-Tested on Nintendo Switch