When I am not busy playing tycoon games or writing about them, I am known to have a book in front of me. Most of the time, when I am not reading for my work, I am reading science fiction. It isn’t hard to imagine me getting excited over a space tycoon game.
Mars Horizon is being developed by Auroch Digital, a studio based in England. Last weekend they invited players to an alpha weekend, and I was one of those lucky enough to get my hands on a code. I squeezed about two hours of playing time between chores and supervising my kids’ shenanigans in the swimming pool.
The alpha was limited to one playable faction (the USA, so, NASA) and you could not venture beyond our own companion, the Moon.
Roughly, the game is divided in two major components. There is a part where you build your base and manage your agency. The structures on your base help you train astronauts, build rockets or influence some of the games’ statistics. In the well-designed managementscreens, you can accept missions, develop vehicles and make personnel decisions.
When you are happy with your rocket, it’s time to launch it into space, eventually. You will start dabbling around with rockets that can barely make it out of Earth’s atmosphere, never mind achieving orbit or even reaching the Moon. Building rockets is as simple as selecting components (payload and booster in this version so far) and giving the order to build it. While many people have compared Mars Horizon to Kerbal Space Program, I don’t really see that much similarity beyond the theme and the cheery art style. You don’t have the dept of options in building a spaceship that Kerbal gives you, but that might come at a later date? For now the system is efficient en easy to use. Less clear is the influence using certain modules has on the outcome of your mission. There are some limits to range and weight, but those are clearly stated, making it nearly impossible to launch a wrong combo. I am guessing that with more available modules, the choices you can make will increase dramatically. Thus making the impact your decisions have on the mission a lot bigger. We’ll see.
When the vehicle is ready, the game reminds you of that fact and the mission the vehicle is meant to be performing. Accepting that means that you go to the launchpad and will see your rocket soar into the skies. Or explode. In the early stages of your play, that is a very likely option. Again I don’t really see a way to influence that at the moment. The game offers 3 potential outcomes of the launch, and some algorithm (or a simple dice roll) in the background decides which outcome will influence your launch.
The launch itself (as is everything I have seen of the game so far) is very nice to look at and, despite the lack of a clear skip button, it is skippable. Very nice to have after having seen the fun launch sequence animation once to many.
When you have launched succesfully, you move into the second mechanic of the game. 
A mechanic that confused me a bit. Not so much because it is difficult, more because I felt it lacked clear feedback (again) on the outcome of my actions. In essence you play a minigame where you balance several resources in order to fullfil small strategic challenges in a turn-based fashion. In the games description on Steam the developers worded it like this: These are the critical moment-to-moment decisions of mission control; do you spend power to fix a malfunctioning antenna or save it in case of an oxygen leak? Perhaps risking that extra three months of mission planning could have avoided this issue?
When playing, I don’t see that come out yet. Yes I balance those resources and yes I can decide to either fix something or not (often more driven by lack of a certain resource than my own wishes) but the connection between that and the succes or failure of a mission is not clear to me. I found that any task I failed at meant that my mission did not succeed. I felt that to be a bit harsh, I understand that a cabin blowing up, scattering pieces of my rocket and its animal occupant into an orbit around Earth is bad for my mission, but the loss of one single experiment should not always mean the loss of the entire mission. That is why backups and human intervention exist.
In general I think the developers are creating a game here that I will play quite a bit of. Not only to write about it but also just for the fun of it. I look forward to emulate the achievements Nasa, ESA and Roskosmos have reached over the years and to lead them beyond the current state of space flight. I am very curious whether options like space tourism will be in the game as well. I’ll definitely keep an eye on this one.
