When people eventually get to Mars there will be far more work than available personnel to do it all. We’ll be moving from a planet that doesn’t care too much about our existence one way or another but at least we’ve got the advantage of having evolved to fit into its environment, over to a completely new planet that’s actively hostile to us being there. Thankfully we’ll still be armed with our big tool-using monkey-brains, able to whip up whatever device is needed for the task at hand, and that applies to transportation as much as any other industry. In Mars First Logistics it’s up to you to build a rover from modular parts, capable of bringing whatever needs to be moved from one base to the next, over terrain that may be gentle enough in some areas but is nowhere near ready to be considered a road in others.
The demo for Mars First Logisiticsdropped todayand it’s a fantastically cel-shaded tour of the first Martian settlement, where you get to figure out how best to carry awkward cargo from where it is to where it’s needed. Being a demo the large open-world map only has a few sites built in, starting from an initial transmitter on an easy flat sandy plain with a few buildings poking up from the distance where the terrain gets a bit rougher. The beginning rover is little more than an engine, a few cubic hub pieces, and some wheels, but it’s enough to get moving to the first simple mission of carrying a watering can to the greenhouse. This mission gives a blueprint that auto-assembles the available rover pieces into a functional carrier, which basically adds a lightly-curved claw piece on a rotating motor. Hook the claw into the handle, rotate the claw up a bit to start carrying, and try not to let the weight of the watering can throw the rover’s steering off too much. If you flip the rover you’re able to right it with a button press, and if the mission goes completely off the rails it can be restarted from scratch, but there’s nothing too tricky until it’s time to work on building the observatory.
Each mission rewards a pile of credits and credits are used to buy more parts for the rover. One of the potential challenges, though, is that it’s much easier to dream up the perfect item carrier than it is to buy the extra pieces needed to build it, so you’ll sometimes need to figure out how to manage with what you’ve got. How that will play out when you’ve completed a pile of contracts and have decent cash reserves will have to wait for the full game, but the demo at least has a couple of missions where ambitious ideas get hit with budgetary constraints. Figuring out how to build efficiently is always a good puzzle, though, and the pieces are all there if you can just put them together in the right way.
While the demo is fairly short it does show off a good number of features and great views of Mars, although I’ve yet to see Deimos or Phobos crossing the sky. There are only eight parts to play with but you can do a surprising amount with them, especially seeing as two of the parts are motorized. The interface for creating your rover is clean and simple, making it easy to build, tear apart, and rebuild while experimenting towards a functioning solution, and assuming it’s hasn’t been built completely lopsided or top-heavy the rover controls just about as you’d expect. This leaves the challenge to be a combination of design and playing with the physics of carrying weirdly-shaped items across unhelpfully-bumpy terrain, and it’s not unusual to show up at the destination with the cargo dragging on the ground or caught on the rover’s carrying arm. It’s going to take a lot of work to make Mars habitable, but the modular little rover of Mars First Logistics has all the necessary pieces to get everything where it needs to be.
