We recommend Mars: War Logs. That’s a curt appraisal that goes against the score you’ll see on the next page. It’s a strange recommendation, because it’s not one that coincides with a suggestion that the game is particularly good. It’s instead an interesting bookmark for people who’ve a formal interest in game design or criticism. If that’s you, it’s something you should look at, because it’s a great way to understand the difference between a game that gets everything right and one that stumbles spectacularly in so many little areas it entirely fails to justify itself.
Mars: War Logs has a lot of the hallmarks of an excellent game. It’s got a combat system that’s learned from The Witcher’s tactical dodging, parrying and negative status-conferring. It has the kind of exploration and attempts at character work that you’d expect out of Mass Effect, plus a morality system and ways to have a sense of authorship over the way missions end. There’s an interesting crafting system that has you adding components to your existing gear in order to convey different advantages and there’s a plot that can weave and turn with your actions.
None of this emulation, nor the ideas that the game progenerates, succeed and instead appear as if the designers have missed the purpose of their inclusion.
Set in Distant-Future Mars, you play as Roy, a prisoner of war captured by nebulously defined Baddies. The aim of the first act is to escape from your imprisonment and subsequent chapters involve you attempting to overthrow evil by way of helping out strangers with menial tasks that usually involve hitting people with improvised weaponry. The character motivations are rote and the plot itself seems like justification for progression rather than something that works interactivity around it’s own storytelling aims.
Partly why game stories are worth seeing isn’t for their eventual culmination or the events along the way, it’s the character work that propels the player forward. You won’t want to talk to anyone more than you have to, the dialogue is awfully written and the voice acting is just as sub par.
Progressing through that story will involve hundreds of minor skirmishes. There are four types of enemy you can fight. Humans and Mars-Indigenous Moles are almost directly comparable, rarer Technomancer enemies wielding a variety of defensive abilities offer slightly more challenge. Finally, you’ll fight “dogs” (actually massive quadrupedal prawns) who can only be attacked from behind. War Logs suggests it contains a variety of options, but the most effective method is constantly rolling away from danger and performing brief melee attacks when it suits you for every single enemy in the game. You’ve the ability to increase the effectiveness of your “technomancer” abilities that can boost weapon damage, provide a shield or shoot projectiles, but it’s just not as effective as pumping skill points into improving the aforementioned rolling tactic as there’s a cap on how much you can use those abilities without recharging.
You’ve partner AIs that join you in combat, but only a character that’s brought into your party in the last act of the game has any effectiveness as a fighter rather than a tool with which to draw some of the enemies away from you and eventually faint. There’s no way to outfit these partner characters with better equipment nor specialise their skills in any way. It leaves you feeling as if there’s barely a reason for their assistance.
Often during a mission you’ll have to take back something that’s stolen or collect money backtracking constantly through the same areas. You’ll usually be given a choice between intimidating the target or hopping into a fight. Intimidation might not work and could transition into combat anyway. This kind of system works elsewhere because you’d have the option to put stat points into your abilities to talk people into agreeing with you. Here the only character upgrades you can make are directly tied to your effectiveness in battle. You don’t get the sense that you’re making decisions based on the route you’ve chosen for your character, instead it’s just selecting an option that may spare you a fight or not work and is essentially the same choice presented differently.
A morality system is similarly tied to the way you choose to complete missions, taking stolen money for yourself or delivering back to the rightful owner and so on, but more contentiously and gamic is a system where after a fight you can extract the game’s currency from the bodies of knocked out foes, killing them in the process. This is considered an evil action and will poorly impact people’s opinion of you. It’s a bad system for a number of reasons. Firstly, there’s rarely a reason you’ll even need to spend money. You’ll be fine with what you can salvage in the environment. Secondly, by remaining good you’ll eventually get a blanket 50% discount from retailers. This negates the difference. At a point, the benefit of being either evil or good is effectively the same thing.
The environments don’t feel fully realised, which is a crime given how everything takes place in a few tiny hub areas. It’s not a game with a grand amount of scale, the amount of locations are tiny and yet none of them provide a sense of genuine presence. If the game’s environments were perhaps more varied you could forgive a lack of detail, but you spend so much time wandering around within them it’s terrible there’s not more life and vibrancy. The game ends up feeling empty as a result. It desperately needed more ambient dialogue from non-playable characters you can’t interact with or more diegetic music to better provide a sense of immersion. It’d be fine that a game set on Mars lacks believability, it’s inexcusable that it lacks verisimilitude.
Weapons and Armour don’t come fully completed as a base item, there’s a crafting system where you scavenge for materials in the world and then can combine them to create additional parts. It’s a very interesting idea and one of the few genuinely notable things here, but the way that it’s been implemented is lacking. Because the attachments - for instance - increase the amount of damage you deal, it’s hard to measure up against another piece of equipment that doesn’t already have upgrades attached to it. You’ll find it tough to tell if it has the potential to be better because you can’t effectively determine what it’s like at it’s best.
The system doesn’t let you remove attachments you’ve created for existing armours, but it does let you recycle materials into new upgrades. This suggests that you should create worse add-ons while you wait for better materials, but in reality you’ll probably just wait until the new armour set is increased in effectiveness over your existing set before putting it on. It’s a good idea, it’s just not one that’s been thought through quite well enough.
Mars: War Logs is an attempt at a AAA title without the necessary tools to provide it. The problems it faces are as a result of too high an expectation of what could reasonably be achieved. Scaled down it’s highly likely that something more meaningful could have sprung from development, but the content is stretched too thin. The best thing we’ve received from the team’s efforts is a reference point for how not to implement great ideas
Mars: War Logs has a lot of the hallmarks of an excellent game. It’s got a combat system that’s learned from The Witcher’s tactical dodging, parrying and negative status-conferring. It has the kind of exploration and attempts at character work that you’d expect out of Mass Effect, plus a morality system and ways to have a sense of authorship over the way missions end. There’s an interesting crafting system that has you adding components to your existing gear in order to convey different advantages and there’s a plot that can weave and turn with your actions.
None of this emulation, nor the ideas that the game progenerates, succeed and instead appear as if the designers have missed the purpose of their inclusion.
Set in Distant-Future Mars, you play as Roy, a prisoner of war captured by nebulously defined Baddies. The aim of the first act is to escape from your imprisonment and subsequent chapters involve you attempting to overthrow evil by way of helping out strangers with menial tasks that usually involve hitting people with improvised weaponry. The character motivations are rote and the plot itself seems like justification for progression rather than something that works interactivity around it’s own storytelling aims.
Partly why game stories are worth seeing isn’t for their eventual culmination or the events along the way, it’s the character work that propels the player forward. You won’t want to talk to anyone more than you have to, the dialogue is awfully written and the voice acting is just as sub par.
Progressing through that story will involve hundreds of minor skirmishes. There are four types of enemy you can fight. Humans and Mars-Indigenous Moles are almost directly comparable, rarer Technomancer enemies wielding a variety of defensive abilities offer slightly more challenge. Finally, you’ll fight “dogs” (actually massive quadrupedal prawns) who can only be attacked from behind. War Logs suggests it contains a variety of options, but the most effective method is constantly rolling away from danger and performing brief melee attacks when it suits you for every single enemy in the game. You’ve the ability to increase the effectiveness of your “technomancer” abilities that can boost weapon damage, provide a shield or shoot projectiles, but it’s just not as effective as pumping skill points into improving the aforementioned rolling tactic as there’s a cap on how much you can use those abilities without recharging.
You’ve partner AIs that join you in combat, but only a character that’s brought into your party in the last act of the game has any effectiveness as a fighter rather than a tool with which to draw some of the enemies away from you and eventually faint. There’s no way to outfit these partner characters with better equipment nor specialise their skills in any way. It leaves you feeling as if there’s barely a reason for their assistance.
Often during a mission you’ll have to take back something that’s stolen or collect money backtracking constantly through the same areas. You’ll usually be given a choice between intimidating the target or hopping into a fight. Intimidation might not work and could transition into combat anyway. This kind of system works elsewhere because you’d have the option to put stat points into your abilities to talk people into agreeing with you. Here the only character upgrades you can make are directly tied to your effectiveness in battle. You don’t get the sense that you’re making decisions based on the route you’ve chosen for your character, instead it’s just selecting an option that may spare you a fight or not work and is essentially the same choice presented differently.
A morality system is similarly tied to the way you choose to complete missions, taking stolen money for yourself or delivering back to the rightful owner and so on, but more contentiously and gamic is a system where after a fight you can extract the game’s currency from the bodies of knocked out foes, killing them in the process. This is considered an evil action and will poorly impact people’s opinion of you. It’s a bad system for a number of reasons. Firstly, there’s rarely a reason you’ll even need to spend money. You’ll be fine with what you can salvage in the environment. Secondly, by remaining good you’ll eventually get a blanket 50% discount from retailers. This negates the difference. At a point, the benefit of being either evil or good is effectively the same thing.
The environments don’t feel fully realised, which is a crime given how everything takes place in a few tiny hub areas. It’s not a game with a grand amount of scale, the amount of locations are tiny and yet none of them provide a sense of genuine presence. If the game’s environments were perhaps more varied you could forgive a lack of detail, but you spend so much time wandering around within them it’s terrible there’s not more life and vibrancy. The game ends up feeling empty as a result. It desperately needed more ambient dialogue from non-playable characters you can’t interact with or more diegetic music to better provide a sense of immersion. It’d be fine that a game set on Mars lacks believability, it’s inexcusable that it lacks verisimilitude.
Weapons and Armour don’t come fully completed as a base item, there’s a crafting system where you scavenge for materials in the world and then can combine them to create additional parts. It’s a very interesting idea and one of the few genuinely notable things here, but the way that it’s been implemented is lacking. Because the attachments - for instance - increase the amount of damage you deal, it’s hard to measure up against another piece of equipment that doesn’t already have upgrades attached to it. You’ll find it tough to tell if it has the potential to be better because you can’t effectively determine what it’s like at it’s best.
The system doesn’t let you remove attachments you’ve created for existing armours, but it does let you recycle materials into new upgrades. This suggests that you should create worse add-ons while you wait for better materials, but in reality you’ll probably just wait until the new armour set is increased in effectiveness over your existing set before putting it on. It’s a good idea, it’s just not one that’s been thought through quite well enough.
Mars: War Logs is an attempt at a AAA title without the necessary tools to provide it. The problems it faces are as a result of too high an expectation of what could reasonably be achieved. Scaled down it’s highly likely that something more meaningful could have sprung from development, but the content is stretched too thin. The best thing we’ve received from the team’s efforts is a reference point for how not to implement great ideas
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