Back in 2020, I reviewed Per Aspera. At the time, the game was still rough around the edges and I mentioned that it needed some work. Now fast forward 2 years and we’ve got two DLC updates which have seemingly brought a lot more to the Martian table.
Green Mars was a free update which allowed for a much more livable Mars. This added flowing water, biomes, farms and a heck of a lot of greenery once you got your required terraforming conditions met.
Blue Mars
Blue Mars, the paid DLC update expanded upon this even further. Diving into this, however, players are in for some disappointment. To start with, if you had a campaign saved previously, you might as well throw that out the window and just start anew like how I did. This means that you’re going to have to play through quite a lot of content before you even get to the point where you can start making use of the Blue Mars features. Expect to put in around 3 to 4 hours of gameplay building up your settlement on Mars before you’re able to start getting access to water.
Once you finally do have access to large bodies of water though, this is where it becomes painfully obvious that the Blue Mars DLC looked better on paper than it does in action. Players will only have access to a literal handful of buildings that they can build on water and if you wanted to create an ocean metropolis, you’ll, unfortunately, be out of luck here.
Ocean Mining
You can only build mines and water-based research sites with ports, shipyards and water-based wind turbines. Oh, and there’s a fishery too. That’s it unfortunately and this is incredibly disappointing and lacklustre. Yes, it’s great to be able to mine resources that were covered by water when you thawed Mars’s polar ice caps. Yes, it’s great to be able to still gain research from sites that were submerged by the oceans. However, this is all there really is to it and somehow I was expecting so much more from this DLC, especially given how the original announcement made it seem like the vast oceans of Mars awaited conquering.
Given the fact that this DLC is only $5 though, I suppose this was to be expected. Blue Mars is unfortunately an incredibly wasted opportunity and it would be great if the developers expanded upon this a lot more in future updates. We could have had coral reefs, ocean life adapted to Mars, cruise liners and more ocean-specific technologies but instead, we just have some rather basic functionality added to the game that honestly, isn’t all that useful by the time you get access to the oceans.
Using ships and ports to ferry resources across large bodies of water only makes sense if you’re in the early game and don’t have access to the Hyperloop. It’s also only really useful if you are resource hungry and need to mine resource sites that were submerged. Some players might find a building on the ocean useful if they set up two outposts across a large body of water but this isn’t something you would be doing as a newbie because of the game’s difficulty and learning curve.
Graphically, the Blue Mars DLC looks about as great as it should be. The buildings that you can place on the ocean are reskins of the original ones and the fishery, ports and shipyards look good.
Final Verdict
Overall, Per Aspera’s Blue Mars DLC is more of the same and honestly, it feels like this should have been a free update too just like Green Mars. If the developers can add more content to the game and this DLC, it would be worth recommending. Unfortunately, Blue Mars was extremely disappointing and didn’t deliver as much as I thought it would. If you want to support the developers, grab this DLC. If however, you were already enjoying the base game, I can’t really recommend picking this up because it’s extremely content dry. If you want to support the developers though, buying this DLC is a good way to do that. Maybe future updates will be better.
Developer: Tlön Industries
Publisher: Raw Fury
Platform: Microsoft Windows
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