I cherished Ship Us the Moon. I assumed it was completely paced and stuffed with participating set items, tons of selection, and an enthralling story. Quite the opposite, I identical to Ship Us Mars. It very a lot builds on the plotting of its predecessor, provides new gameplay mechanics, and contains a a lot bigger price range. However its pacing can’t match the final recreation, it has some vexing bugs, and the repetition of the climbing and puzzle sections saved it from fulfilling my expectations. It’s undoubtedly price enjoying for followers but it surely merely isn’t as gratifying an expertise.
Ship Us Mars switches protagonists, which received’t come as a shock because the final recreation ended with its lead perishing after succeeding in his mission. You play as Kathy Johanson, daughter of Isaac and sister of Claire from Ship Us the Moon. After Claire rescues Sarah Baker from cryo, she’s in a position to efficiently save Kathy from Isaac in his try and load her onto an ark and flee to hitch the remainder of Outward. Now an grownup, Kathy joins Claire, Sarah, and Sarah’s husband Ryan on a trek to Mars to seek out out what occurred to Outward and produce the arks to Earth with the intention to save the planet from its existential disaster.
The story stays participating, solely it’s introduced otherwise. The earlier recreation didn’t have the cash for character faces and cutscenes, so the story was fully delivered by holograms and audio information. Ship Us Mars has character fashions for your entire predominant solid, plus bigger, more-detailed areas to maneuver round in. However there’s a giant downside. The character faces look type of terrible. They’re both bizarre or unusually old-looking and facial animations are lower than stellar.
Screenshot by PC Invasion
What did you do to your hair?
The hair is the worst, although. Once we first meet Kathy as a baby, she has a haircut that appears like she did it herself, because it’s horribly uneven and appears horrible. As an grownup, Kathy bafflingly has the very same haircut together with a bizarre, little sideburn that’s hooked up to nothing. I used to be shocked no person tried to enhance this earlier than launch. Not less than the voice performing is pretty much as good because it was earlier than. The solid does an amazing job of bringing these characters to life, even when a few of them are pretty unlikable. This can be a notably longer recreation too. Ship Us the Moon is about 5 hours lengthy, whereas Ship Us Mars is round eight-and-a-half. The story comes collectively properly ultimately, but it surely undoubtedly feels prefer it meanders in comparison with the final go round.
Ship Us Mars has a set of various gameplay kinds. You stroll round and search for issues to work together with, typically float round or swim in first-person, drive a rover, lower issues aside with a laser, climb, platform, and clear up a few forms of puzzles. However whereas Ship Us the Moon continuously saved issues contemporary and efficiently made every goal really feel significant, Ship Us Mars is stuffed with fluff that doesn’t really feel anyplace close to as very important.
That is merely a slower journey versus the tight pacing you could expect. And there are such a lot of instances when you need to cease what you’re doing to slowly use pickaxes to climb some partitions or purpose a laser to unravel a puzzle. These two issues are regurgitated again and again. The climbing is pretty intelligent even when it’s usually considerably uninteresting. You must slam each pickaxes right into a wall to climb it earlier than swapping backwards and forwards between them to slowly make headway. However it may be just a little clunky, particularly in terms of leaping backward. The primary time the sport requested me to do that, I had no concept it was even potential as the sport by no means teaches you about it. I’m not even totally certain the way it works.
Screenshot by PC Invasion
Not one other laser puzzle
However whereas the climbing is tolerable and sometimes accompanied by some pretty concerned platforming sequences, the puzzle-solving is lackluster. Whereas Ship Us the Moon by no means tried to be a Portal-styled puzzler, Ship Us Mars tries its finest to return to that properly again and again. You’ll sometimes want to chop a number of locks to launch a tool that may shoot a laser to energy up a generator. However this will get extra difficult as the sport goes on, requiring you to make use of splitters and energy dampeners to achieve a number of turbines without delay. These puzzles are okay, however they’re not all that enjoyable and there are just too lots of them.
Then there are the hologram puzzles. Ship Us the Moon had ASE holograms you’d work together with to look at a recording of a scene play out and people return. However now you have to clear up one-to-three decryption puzzles to view them. These puzzles are pretty poor, as they solely encompass transferring your ASE round to try to get three yellow locks to enter a hologram and switch blue. The sport doesn’t even remotely try to clarify how they work they usually truthfully haven’t any enterprise being within the recreation in any respect.
And that’s the largest downside with Ship Us Mars. It desires to be a beefier recreation, but it surely pads itself out with meaningless filler to do this, which makes it a far cry from the targeted expertise the primary recreation offered. It’s superb so far as narrative journey video games go, however the first recreation simply felt higher to play. There are additionally a good quantity of bugs that drag issues down. I had crashes in addition to prompts that often didn’t work, requiring me to give up to the menu. On multiple event, I couldn’t even begin the decryption puzzles to look at holograms. It’s also possible to fully skip the primary main climbing part by rigorously leaping down a mountain.
Screenshot by PC Invasion
It doesn’t assist that the sport’s characters is usually a bit arduous to narrate to and that the speedy targets simply aren’t all that fascinating. I had a reasonably first rate time with the sport general because of the story, however I can’t assist however really feel dissatisfied that the sequel to a recreation I cherished a lot simply didn’t hit the identical notes. Followers will discover it price a playthrough however shouldn’t anticipate the identical degree of exhilaration and narrative funding that its predecessor offered. It was attempt, however the devs simply didn’t ship us an equal expertise this time round. Possibly the third recreation will get us there.
