Another week, another free game at Epic: This time you can grab the building strategy game Surviving Mars for free and keep it forever. In it you build a colony on Mars and try to keep your people there happy and content … and of course alive.
Surviving Mars will be available for free on the Epic Games Store from March 11-18, 2021. If you grab the game during this period, it will be yours forever.
But free games also cost time: That’s why we’re giving you all the information you need to make an informed decision: Is Surviving Mars something for you?
That’s what Surviving Mars is all about
The building game by Tropico 4 developer Haemimont Games does not send you to a tropical, sunny paradise, but this time to the hostile surface of the planet Mars. There you should build a livable home for humanity – no problem, with a little expertise and motivation. Or does it?
First of all, you decide where you want to land your spaceship – depending on the location, there are different raw material deposits and disaster probabilities. So you already notice: Mars is not that cozy and inviting at first. But with a knack for economics, finance and micromanagement, you can create your very own paradise here.
In your dome colony you build leisure facilities, residential units and – very importantly – a space bar. You colonize these places with people who you order from the earth and who each bring with them special professions and qualities. Level-headed workers are immune to warehouse fever, people with the attribute “sexy” boost the birth rate. Surviving Mars takes most of the time with a wink.
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Surviving Mars – test video for the dem anding colonization of Mars
Is it worth the download?
Surviving Mars is a really successful building strategy game that even got a rating of 82 in our GameStar test 2018. So it’s definitely one of the highlights of the weekly Epic free games, especially if you’re into building survival elements anyway.
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Surviving Mars put to the test – complex like SpaceX
However, if you are new to the genre, you can be a bit overwhelmed, because the game explains very little and there is often a lack of clever tips and tutorials for complex mechanics. Nevertheless, we can highly recommend the free download of Surviving Mars, because it offers a believable and interesting Mars setting, an enormous amount of game depth, entertaining story quests and a high replay value.
What is the current state of the game?
Only the base game Surviving Mars is included in the free promotion. Since its release in 2018, it has received some updates and a total of 7 DLCs, one of which is free, namely the Mysteries Resupply Pack, which integrates three mysterious events into the game, for example a huge monolith. So you can download it directly.
You can get the paid DLCs to match the free campaign with a 50 percent discount in the Epic Store. The last DLC is called Green Planet, was released in 2019 and brings numerous new projects, terraforming options and plant species. There are currently no new DLCs for Surviving Mars, but it does offer full mod support from the community.
