GOL Cast: Growing space potatoes in Sol 0: Mars Colonization

This time around I am taking a look at a game I picked up some time ago for a Friday Livestream simply because it was cheap. So, let's go to Mars in Sol 0: Mars Colonization!

Sol 0: Mars Colonization is a Mars colony builder, which likely surprises nobody, developed by Chondrite Games in which you must bring the mankind to Mars and create a colony and eventually reach material independence from Earth.


I am going to be completely honest, I came into this game with quite low expectations. The game released on 15th of January which happened to be Friday and I happened to spot the game while scanning through the new releases page on Steam. Due to the cheap price and the fairly promising screenshots I decided to pick it up and take it for a spin on the livestream.

The basic concept of Sol 0 is quite simple. You need to bring equipment and supplies to Mars via rockets, set up a colony and utilize the local resources in addition to what you might have brought with you in order to keep your colony up and running and over time grow you colony. A good portion of the game is managing your supplies. You need enough water, food, oxygen and electricity to keep your colonists happy and, well, alive. Every now and then you can send in more rockets to bring in more colonists, supplies and building materials but you can only send rockets at certain intervals, which forces you to survive at least until the next rocket comes around.

The key to survival is harnessing local resources. Before you even send anyone on Mars you might want to send in at least one exploration rover to scan the Martian soil for things like ice, methane and ores. Ice is naturally the most important resource as it allows you to fill up your water reserves with water extractors. Methane will become important when you want to clear up areas by launching away the landers you have laying around after a couple of supply trips and ores can eventually be refined into building materials necessary for colony expansions.

Progression in Sol 0 is fairly ordinary. Your end goal is to terraform Mars and to declare independence from Earth which will then cut off all rocket launches from Earth and your colony's population growth will be handled via natural means. In order to reach that goal you need to build water extractors, greenhouses, oxygen generators, solar panels, habitats etc. to take care of your colonists' basic needs. As you build more buildings and you gain more colonists more buildings will be unlocked. Eventually you'll replace the solar panels with geothermal plants which are easier to maintain and your greenhouses with farms which have better potential for food production.

There aren't a whole lot of unique and complicated gaming mechanics and pretty much anyone that has played a colony builder of some sort can pick the game up without needing much in the way of guidance. However, there are a couple of mechanics that are quite interesting. For example, the way farms work was pretty cool. To gain optimal amounts of food from farms you need to mix various strains of microflora to make the crops more resistant to the harsh Martian conditions. You start out by combining a couple of very basic types of microflora but eventually you will combine various of your own strains together to create what can be best described as awesome space potatoes. Sadly, in-depth gameplay mechanics are pretty much limited to the farming and microflora management and outside of that things are quite basic.

The game wouldn't be too difficult if you only had to take care of resource management. However, when you finally think you have a fairly stable colony the game throws in one more hurdle: random events. These events come in forms of dust storms, solar flares and meteor showers and they can be quite deadly if you don't pay attention. Dust storms have a tendency of making your solar panels nearly useless and meteor showers for some reason always seem to hit critical parts of your colony, cutting your hallways in half and destroying oxygen and water related equipment. There are also smaller random events that appear if you have too many buildings and not enough colonists which usually just lead to lost resources in the form of frozen pipes and blighted crops. I suppose the idea behind that is that your colony doesn't have enough people maintaining the equipment and things start breaking down.

Just like the gameplay isn't particularly innovative, the graphics are also fairly basic but not particularly bad. There's a fair amount of detail but things are also quite easy to recognize and find. However, this game is obviously not something you'd use to demonstrate the power of your GPU with. The positive side of this is that the system requirements are also quite low, on the store page an Intel HD Graphics 3000 is required as a minimum and a GTX 260 or an R7 512 MB AMD GPU recommended. My laptop with Intel HD Graphics 3000 was definitely able to play the game quite fine at the native resolution of 1366x768 and my R7 370 saw no issues either. I did notice the game slowing down towards the late-game though so an Intel HD Graphics 3000 system might start to struggle a little when your colony grows larger.

While the game is for the most part fairly solid, I do have a couple of annoyances with it. My biggest issue so far has been the lack of a cancel button when you enter the launch menu where you select the payload and send rockets to Mars. The bigger rockets that can carry colonists and significantly larger amounts of supplies and equipment can only be launched if the launchpad on your colony is empty, so if you forgot to empty the launchpad before entering the launch menu you are either stuck with the small rockets or orbital satellite launchers, which I never really used. This can have devastating results if your colony is facing a disaster and other times it's a major annoyance as the interval between rocket launches is not particularly short. This problem would be fairly easy to address too, as I see no benefit in having no cancel button whatsoever.

Another issue is the user interface. In my opinion the UI of Sol 0 is quite confusing at times and I've often wondered where I could find certain functionality. For example, before I started recording the commentary for this GOL Cast I was fairly certain there was no way to demolish buildings in the game. Checking the Steam forums informed me that this functionality was indeed present in the game but I simply had never found it. The issue to me isn't really the complexity of the UI as most functionality seems to be accessible with just one or two clicks but the layout and icons of the various buttons seems to have confused me. I suppose the problem could be remedied by adding more text and tool-tips or by making the tutorial focus on more than the very basic gameplay aspects.

Sol 0: Mars Colonization is not a perfect game and it isn't nearly as innovative or in-depth as something like Kerbal Space Program. However, it's worth keeping the price in mind. Sol 0: Mars Colonization costs a mere 6€ when sold at full price and discounts are bound to happen eventually and when they do, the game will be ridiculously cheap. Sol 0 also isn't just a crappy game sold at cheap either, it's actually fairly good. I played the game for about 4.5 hours and I did enjoy my time. There's a fair amount of entertainment too, as the game comes with 8 different maps, each one taking maybe around 4-7 hours to reach the goal of terraforming and declaring independence on. The game also comes with a level editor and has support for player-made maps via Steam Workshop so if you are into mapping or want some additional content, Sol 0 has you covered there. If you are on a budget and want to do some space exploration, Sol 0: Mars Colonization could be what you are looking for. It's not the shiniest of games but also isn't marketing itself as one.

You can download a demo from their website: http://www.solzerogame.com/store.php

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.