Mars Power Industries

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Mars Power Industries is a fairly minimalist Puzzle game where you are placing a predetermined number of power stations on Mars terrain to power nearby terraforming bases, with each level testing you to see if you can figure out the best placement.

In theory, this is all pretty simple and straightforward. However, in practice, the game’s minimalism kinda’ hurts it, as the rules for placement aren’t exactly clear. The directional symbols on bases and in the queue are small and don’t stand out very well, despite that this information is vital. The reason you can place on some spaces and not on others, and the fact that this seems to be constantly changing, isn’t clear unless you pay close attention to the ground spaces and deduce the meaning behind what you’re seeing. There’s a lot of guesswork here for what should be a quick and simple puzzle game, and that makes it unnecessarily frustrating. The result was that once I actually figured out how the game works, I was already losing interest in it, and the limited and tedious gameplay did little to win me back over.

The game’s visual presentation looks nice, although many of the problems I point to above are due to a lack of clarity in that presentation. However, I can’t deny that the game looks appealing, at least.

I really like the concept of Mars Power Industries, but in practice it’s a game that has rules it doesn’t tell you, leading to frustration until you get the hang of it, and even then, the the gameplay isn’t especially compelling. For only $4, it’s a decent enough puzzle game, I suppose, but there are better options out there.

tl;dr – Mars Power Industries is a Puzzle game that has you placing power stations of Mars to power local terraforming bases. It’s a fun concept with an inviting presentation, but it’s so minimalist that it does a poor job of conveying what you’re supposed to be doing or the rules the game is imposing on players. The result is a game that’s unnecessarily frustrating, and even once you’re past that frustration the game underneath isn’t terribly compelling.

Grade: C-

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