I think it’s reasonable to say that very few people (if any) ever expected the cult classic 1996 film Mars Attacks! to be revived after thirty years, especially not as a theme park management sim video game. Nevertheless, I present to you Mars Attracts, developed and published by Outlier. Mars Attracts has spent the past year in Steam Early Access, but has now exited Early Access and launched into primetime. Do the Martians truly come in peace this time, or are they once again counting on the general stupidity of all humanity to fool us like they did back in 1996?

Well, let me switch on my pocket-sized universal translator so I can tell you (and U.S. President Jack Nicholson) exactly what they’re up to. As you’d likely expect, the amusement parks you build in Mars Attracts are built on Mars itself and are intended to be enjoyed by Martians, not humans. Or, more specifically, your theme parks are intended to be enjoyed by Martians almost entirely at the expense of humans. You can send expeditions to various points in human history, such as Ancient Rome and the Wild West, to abduct both humans and era-appropriate decor.

In the universe of Mars Attracts, you see, humans can only perceive time as linear. No such biological limitation binds Martians, and so time travel is trivial for them. Each era of human history from which you can abduct human attractions has its own designated enclosure, which is basically the only place you can put those humans if you don’t want immediate and total chaos breaking loose in your park. Since Martians have a decent appetite for watching cruel, horrible things happen to humans, you have to counterbalance that by striving to keep your human captives happy as well.

Humans and Martians alike need the same general types of amenities to keep their spirits up, though of course you go about providing those basic needs to both groups in very different ways. For your Martian patrons, you can build decently high-class-looking food and drink stalls, as well as private toilet facilities (that’ll become important momentarily). Humans, however, are provided “nutrient-rich paste” out of a trough from which they have to get on all fours to eat, water out of small fountains, and entirely transparent showers and toilet stalls. Your guests want to observe literally everything humans do, after all.

To further facilitate entertaining your guests at the expense of humans you capture, you’ll want to build “observation platforms” in each human enclosure you construct. When staffed with scientists you can hire, these allow you to conduct scientific experiments on human captives. These experiments vary widely in scope, scientific value, entertainment value for spectators, and severity in terms of what they inflict on humans. Thus, it follows that humans particularly dislike being experimented on, especially if you do it too often. That goes back to your need to balance your captives’ happiness with that of your visitors.

If humans are kept highly unhappy for too long, be that due to perpetually unmet needs, too-frequent experiments, or both and more besides, they can become so angry that they outright throw a tantrum. When this happens, they’re liable to destroy any Martian-made structures within their enclosure and/or attempt to escape said enclosure. If any escapes are attempted, especially by more than one human at a time, you can pay a hefty fee to call in a Martian SWAT team and have them restore order. Of course, as the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Ordinarily, you can click on any individual human in your park to see how their needs meters are looking and what they’re currently the happiest or unhappiest about. However, due to what I suspect is a bug within an update pushed on Mars Attracts’ 1.0 launch day, hovering over the tooltip that tells you why a human is unhappy simply reads “localized text not found” as of the time of writing. I’m sure this will be addressed soon – quite possibly even before this article is published – but it did make finishing up this review slightly difficult.

The subject of that bug brings me to my closing points about Mars Attracts. Even if you’re a huge fan of the Mars Attacks! intellectual property, I can’t confidently say Mars Attracts innovates enough to stand out much within its genre. Its campaign and sandbox modes are enjoyable enough, but they don’t deviate much from what you’d probably expect from a game of this ilk. In fact, call me cynical, but something tells me Mars Attracts is leaning rather heavily on its attachment to the Mars Attacks! IP as its main way of — forgive the pun — “attracting” attention to itself.

Therefore, unless you’re a particularly rabid fan of both Mars Attacks! and theme park builder/management games and are thus dead set on playing Mars Attracts as soon as humanly (Martian-ly?) possible, I would generally advise waiting for a decent discount before buying Mars Attracts. Its base price of $24.99 strikes me as too high for what it offers, especially if you’re less attached to this genre and/or the Mars Attacks! IP. If Mars Attracts were, say, $10 cheaper, I’d be more willing to recommend it, but hey, cases like this are one reason why Steam holds two major sales every year.

A PC review copy of Mars Attracts was provided by Outlier for this review.

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Mars Attracts

$24.99

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Lengthy, replayable campaign.
• Solid core gameplay loop.

Cons

• Its attached IP isn’t enough to stand out in this genre.
• Even for fans of its attached IP, base price seems too high for what’s offered.