Intro

Have you ever wished Planet Zoo was a little bit more… maniacal? Based in the cult-classic universe of Mars Attacks is the brand new Mars Attracts. No it’s not a dating app for martians, this brand new park-management simulator is a perfect blend of bizarre, while being a deep and fun strategic management. But is it all it’s hyped up to be?

Park Design

So, of course, first, we *have* to talk about the park design features of this game. The game is really easy to get to grips with. It features a really nice grid-based building tool, where you place down a wide array of buildings; your guests arrive in the most creative way I’ve ever seen: through a tube; and there are a bunch of cool rides for your guests to try out. Let’s start with the building. The game has what I’d describe as a Cities: Skylines-esque approach. When you place down buildings, there is a super cool animation of robots appearing to construct your buildings for you that just adds that little bit of personality to the building tool that you simply wouldn’t get if they were just plonked down in the Zoo Tycoon 3 sort of fashion. Sticking with the Cities: Skylines theme, you need to generate power and water for your park. You do this by connecting your park to little power generators, and water wells, - does this mean there *is* water on Mars? - and you need to combine and scale up your systems as your park starts to demand more resources. This is a really nice feature, that’s a lot nicer than Planet Zoo’s approach, for example, where you need to be in range of the buildings and water travels through the quantum universe. Despite having more to it than Planet Zoo, it’s still super simple and easy to get to grips with, making it really accessible for new players to get started right away. The actual buildings you get to place down are pretty cool too. The models look cool, and you need to place down a bunch of shops and stalls, decorations, and amenities. While the models look cool, they are pretty low quality, which explains why the game doesn’t let you get up-close and personal with them. You have to hire members of staff to man these booths, and they need to be kept stocked by your porters, but we’ll come back to this later on. There isn’t a huge amount of decoration items, which can leave your park feeling relatively empty, but the nice designs for the buildings and items that *do* exist compensate for the blandness. The terrain tool that the game has is pretty nice - well, I say terrain. It’s a ground texture painting tool. Your park is flat whether you like it or not. Anyway, the ground texture painting is really nice. You can continue to paint down the same texture again and again for more intensity, as the textures blend against the surrounding cells. Also, the game features a variety of unique, exciting rides for your guests. The designs are super cool, but, again, the models aren’t brilliant so you can’t get up close to look at them. That’s everything about the park design, but we need to talk about the park guests, and the humans themselves.

Guests & Humans

So, let’s talk guests. Firstly, I love how the guests arrive and leave your park. They get about using this cool little tube system straight out of Odd Squad. It is a shame they don’t have a nicer animation leaving the tubes - they sort of just teleport out. Guests have a happiness level that you need to keep nice and high across a bunch of different environmental attributes. They can also have different traits about themselves making them more or less annoying like eating more than usual, or not requiring rests throughout their entire visit. Also, the guests actually care about how well you treat your humans, so you can’t overdo the public decapitations. The needs they have can be fulfilled by drink, food, or map shops, and they also, of course, need access to toilets and benches. I really love the design for the donation boxes you can place down to squeeze every penny out of your guests possible. Anyway, as you play through the campaign, you unlock different cultures and civilisations, starting with the simple Ancient Romans, and moving your way forward in time. There are a bunch of different civilisations to unlock, each with their own theming and specifically designed items for their enclosures. The way you obtain your humans is giving JWE2; you send out teams for different types of expeditions from simple abductions to full-scale planetary invasions, which can bring back a ship-full of humans, or decorations for their enclosures to make them feel more at home in their tiny little boxes. Like the guests, the humans can have personality traits to make them more or less annoying. When you have your humans, you can perform a bunch of different experiments on them to earn science points, which can earn you research points, which we’ll talk about in a sec, and the whole experiment animations are really smooth. They can be a bit funky, like not holding the humans properly, but when you’re so zoomed out it’s not noticeable. So, what’s the management like in Mars Attracts?

Management

Well, the finance menu is pretty cool. You can take out loans to sort out the debt you have inevitably amounted, and, with research, you can increase the limit to get more debt, which will allow you to get into more debt, and, of course, get into more debt. From this menu, you can also adjust the park entry pricing, prices for attractions, and how much all of your shop items cost. The game also has a marketing section which says Coming Soon so that’s fun. The staff system is pretty cool. You need attendants for your shops, janitors to keep everything maintained and clean, security to sort out your humans when they get out, kept in your security centres, scientists to run experiments and man the observation posts, and, finally, porters to transport goods across your park, keeping everything running. Back to the scientists for a second, some experiments require higher numbers of assigned scientists to observation posts to be run, which is pretty cool. Each of your staff can have up to two traits. These, like the guests and humans can have different traits that can make them more or less attractive to employ. For example, they could double the costs of your experiments when they are assigned, or increase a building’s beauty. If you run out of candidates that won’t ruin your park, it costs ten thousand insert currency here, so you need to think wisely about who you hire. Moving on, you can see all about your guests, staff, and humans in the Characters menu. Not a great name, but I don’t think I could have come up with better. This gives you a really nice overall look at the types of guests in your park, their preferences, and how satisfied they are with your park. This also gives you current and lifetime stats on your guest count, which is cool. You can also click on your individual guests to survey them from the sky. Moving on again, the aptly named Park Management management menu shows you basically everything we’ve spoken about so far in one place, along with a few other details like your daily research and the number of rides in your park, although with the small amount of rides there actually are, it would have just been quicker for me to have counted. We also get another look at the very pretty Coming Soon art. Jokes aside, the menu is really intuitive, and super simple to get around. Lastly for management, there is a lovely overlay of a bunch of different features you can access, which can be a huge help for resolving issues in your park. There are a huge amount of filters you can pick from here so it really does help you across the board. 

Visuals

Visuals! What’s the point in having a game at all if it doesn’t look good. Luckily, this game does. Brushing past the poor quality models, the game is really pretty. First of all, the game maps are really nicely designed. Despite being on Mars, the areas are actually really lovely and full of decor. Also, the menu is *really* nicely designed. From the icons to the typography, the developers definitely nailed it with this aspect of the game. The menus are really intuitive and simple to get the hang of. Personally, a favourite of mine has to be the giant red box surrounding buildings that require staffing or restocks of resources. What’s more, the camera movement is really smooth, and the building animations when you place down new objects are really great.

Atmosphere

On to the general atmosphere. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t have one. Do you get it? Because it’s Mars- The game has really nice sound effects, and the whole environment you play in is really nice. The tutorial is great and really helpful, and the similarities between the game and film are really nice to see. Or should I say ack-ack-ack-ack? [] I’ll stop with the jokes. I'm sorry. I won’t lie and say the game doesn’t make me feel a little bit uncomfortable, what with the humans in enclosures, but you can’t deny that it’s a really well-made, and fun game to play. I had a really great time playing it, and I couldn’t recommend it more for fans of the Planet games, JWE, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and other management games. What’s so great about Mars Attracts is how easily you can pick up the game and controls, with little to no experience of tycoon games. Everything is so intuitive. And I know it’s called Mars Attracts, but it is *not* an alien dating game. To see some true Mars Attraction, you should click on the logo on the main menu!

Conclusion

Overall, this is a great game. We had 5 categories, let’s see how my final verdict is. In Park Design, I’d have to give the game an 8/10. The tools are so easy to get to grips with, but unfortunately, the models just aren’t 100% so I couldn’t go any higher. In Guests & Humans, I’d rate the game 7/10 thanks to the depth. Management would take another 8/10 for its both depth and simplicity, and visuals would take a 7. Lastly, I’d rate the general atmosphere a 7/10. Overall, Mars Attracts is great, with an average score of 7.5/10. I’d highly recommend you give it a go. I’d also like to say a huge thank you to the developers for the game key. If you enjoyed this video, leave a like and subscribe! I’ll see you in the next one! Bye!