“This is a story about life, love, and fight.” That red flag should have clued me into what level of polish I could be expecting from Mars Taken. The nice screenshots, and my love for Sci-Fi, made me raise my hand in acceptance when this game popped up for review.

And I’m still regretting that choice - all five painful hours of it.

“Follow a deep story,” It said. “A huge expedition turns into a struggle for survival,” it boasted. “This is an Indie production mainly made by one single person with passion,” it promised.

What a rube I was.

Mars Taken starts out with the protagonist Jonathan Rollins talking to a picture of his sick wife, promising her a swift return and enough cash to save her from an unmentioned affliction. Pay attention, because that is the majority of the story until the ending. The events in between consist of go here, do that, and some banter with NPC’s for color.

Immediately you are introduced to the floaty walking mechanics and cringe-worthy voice acting that will accompany you for the rest of the game. Now, I’ve enjoyed some truly bad Sci-Fi games in the past such as Afterfall Insanity, despite the low budget. I’m no stranger to giving something a pass if it can tell a good story, or create fun gameplay.

Mars Taken does not qualify.

Technically, the game is two thirds functional and one third questionable. I could list its many faults, all of which I was able to overcome. Mars Taken is never truly broken, it can be finished (I think, more on that later) but getting there is a chore.

There is little hand-holding in the game, your compass contains landmark directions and that’s about it. Making it past the first task is a test on how the rest of the game will play, find object A and put it into slot B. No quest markers and a lot of running around will frustrate most as you hit ‘E’ on every samey-looking console on the ship. Accomplishing that, it’s off to Mars proper and the start of the actual game.

The landscape that greeted me had my mouth agape, and I took back all the filthy things I said during the tutorial. Maybe I was being too harsh; This is a one man show, and running around in this pretty environment could prove interesting.

Then the voice actors spoke and it came crashing down again.

Undeterred, I carried on into the orange landscape. Jumping into my rover, I hit the gas and was greeted by the same horrible floaty physics, and now no camera control. Fighting the analog accelerometer as you slide your way around the dust makes the Mako from the first Mass Effect handle like sports car by comparison.

As beautiful as the landscape is, it’s not an open world game. A dungeon system or collectibles would have aided, or at least justified, the huge planet but there is nothing to do - anywhere. Ultimately, it comes off as little more than padding to fill time as you move on to the next marker.

Your objectives revolve around the three bases located on the planet. Mars Taken quickly devolves into an alien invasion (oh - spoiler alert), and you hope for some decent combat to make up for the lack of story or stimulating gameplay.

Well, keep on hoping because there is none to be found.

Starting with no weapons requires stealth, and your previous experience with much better games will unknowingly gift the AI with a level of competence it doesn’t posses. The aliens do not follow a set pattern, and giving them a wide berth is sometimes difficult – but ultimately pointless.

I died half a dozen times trying to be stealthy; Once you are spotted, the creatures will chase you until they kill you – quickly I might add. The save point system is so sparse during the first few hours that I quit more than once in frustration when I saw where it placed me.

What a fool I was.

You learn that their detection level is so short that you can just walk past them, many times without even being spotted. Once you realize this, the knife becomes the best weapon in the game. Staying as little as twenty feet from the enemy will give you the agency to sneak up and stealth kill it from behind in one shot. It cannot, however, be used as a melee weapon, so don’t waste time trying. There are bigger monsters that cannot be dispatched in this fashion, but by the time they show up you will have much heavier weapons that will make comically short work of them.

In-game, narrative cutscenes will occasionally play as you proceed, and they can be more dangerous than the enemy. Once one triggers, the only person that stops is you as your character pontificates slowly about some obvious detail. Meanwhile, an alien is busy hacking you to death until the scene ends.

This sets the tone for most of the game as you travel around the reused and repurposed interiors. Ammo, oxygen, and disks are scattered throughout, but only the first has any function; Oxygen levels never dropped as far as I can tell, and the disks contain nothing whatsoever.

You stealth-kill your way to an objective, maybe two, in each base before it’s off to the next – when you’re not falling through the floor or getting stuck inside objects. The final two bases have some heavy geometry and lighting that the Unity engine can’t seem to handle. For too much of the map I was getting less than 10fps on a 1080ti. I can’t imagine how someone would consider any of this acceptable, but it sits on sale all the same.

The game can be completed though, again – I think: On the way to the final base, you are tasked with finding a battery for a rock crusher. This involves driving over the entire Mars landscape to find one. The map is suddenly smattered with patches of abandoned vehicles, boxes, and aliens guarding them, because video games. Exhausting every location I could find turned up nothing. I suspected this to be a bug, perhaps even game-breaking, but I didn’t want to reload and cross the entire map again, so I simply drove up the side of a mountain and over the top instead.

It worked.

I bypassed the entire mission and drove to the final base to finish the game. There are no achievements, so at best, I missed a cutscene with a rock crusher blasting through a wall.

The ending of the game is short, and contains a twist, because of course it does. It’s not satisfying and surely didn’t make up for the shoddy gameplay and empty plot. I really wanted to like Mars Taken, the screenshots are cleverly used to spark interest, but it’s so broken that even the credits don’t work (just a black screen with music). There is some talent hiding behind the game somewhere; The one-man show is hard to pull off, and maybe the next endeavour will let it come out to play.

Originally posted in May 2018 on Backlog Critic.
Some screenshots have been balanced for visibility.