By now, you all know how much I love a console based management game — and Surviving Mars on Xbox is one such game that quickly gets under your skin. It looks, at first glance, like a fairly straightforward city‑builder with a sci‑fi coat of paint — but once you start laying down structures, mapping your drones and laying oxygen and power pipelines, it becomes clear that this is a far more intricate and absorbing experience than its minimalist presentation suggests.
Surviving Mars‘ premise is simple: You’re tasked with establishing a self‑sustaining colony on Mars. But the execution is anything but simple. Every system is interconnected, every resource has dependencies, and every decision has consequences that ripple across your settlement.
It’s built around a web of logistics — power, water, oxygen, metals, concrete, food, research — and the challenge lies in keeping that web from collapsing as your colony grows. This kind of challenge has often proven fatal on consoles due to the way in which information is accessed and understood, but with six years of PC testing behind Surviving Mars, my hopes were high.
The early game is all about infrastructure. Before a single human arrives, you’ll deploy drones, build extractors, set up solar panels and wind turbines, and establish the basic lifelines that will keep your future colonists alive. This phase is surprisingly meditative. Watching drones scuttle around, assembling buildings piece-by-piece has a satisfying rhythm to it. But it’s also a period where mistakes can snowball. Misjudge your power grid or stretch your resources too thin, and you’ll feel the consequences hours later in occasionally frustrating ways.
Once colonists arrive, the tone shifts. All of a sudden, you’re not just managing machines — you’re managing people with needs, flaws, and expectations. Structures must be carefully planned: housing, workplaces, farms, entertainment, medical facilities, and schools all need to fit together in a way that keeps morale high and productivity stable. Colonists have traits that affect their behaviour, and the mix of personalities inside a dome can make it thrive or implode. A dome full of gamblers, alcoholics, and workaholics is a very different beast from one filled with scientists and botanists.
The game’s systems are layered but readable — just about. Power shortages cascade into oxygen failures. Dust storms cripple solar panels. Cold waves freeze water extractors. Meteor showers punch holes in your infrastructure. Each disaster forces you to adapt, reroute, or rebuild if you can find the cause. The game never feels unfair, but it does demand vigilance that console gamers probably just aren’t used to.
Research is another pillar of the experience. The tech tree is semi‑randomised across 7 areas each playthrough, which keeps the game fresh and encourages different strategies. Some runs might push you toward robotics and automation, others toward agriculture and terraforming. Unlocking new tech feels meaningful, often opening up entirely new ways to solve old problems and you probably won’t see everything on each run.
Performance on Xbox is solid without being remarkable. The interface has been adapted well for a controller, with radial menus and clear shortcuts that make navigation intuitive. Surviving Mars runs smoothly even as your colony expands, and the clean art style scales well on a big screen. It’s a game that feels comfortable to play from the sofa — slow, thoughtful, and absorbing, with a pleasingly detailed aesthetic.
One of Surviving Mars strengths is its pacing. It starts slow, builds steadily, and eventually becomes a sprawling management puzzle where every dome is a small ecosystem and every resource chain is a potential point of failure. Only rarely does this feel overwhelming. In general, players have the room to breathe, to experiment, and to recover from mistakes as long as they immerse themselves in the systems on offer. When things go wrong — and they will — the process of diagnosing the problem and rebuilding is part of the appeal.
There’s also a quiet beauty to the experience. The red planet is stark but striking, and watching your colony light up at night, domes glowing under the stars, carries a sense of accomplishment that few city‑builders match. The soundtrack reinforces this mood: calm, atmospheric, and subtly hopeful.
If there’s a caveat, it’s that Surviving Mars doesn’t hold your hand. It expects you to learn through trial and error, and early failures can be brutal. But for players who enjoy systems‑driven strategy games, that learning curve is part of the reward. The game respects your intelligence and gives you the tools to build something remarkable — if you can keep it alive long enough.
For me, Surviving Mars on Xbox is a standout colony‑builder: thoughtful, challenging, atmospheric, and deeply satisfying. It captures the fantasy of building a civilisation on another world without sacrificing the gritty logistics that make that fantasy believable. It’s a game that rewards patience, planning, and resilience — and one that’s easy to lose hours to without even noticing.
Surviving Mars is available for PC, Xbox and PS5 now.
