Properly, I didn’t have this on my 2025 bingo card, which is a factor I assume all of us have. There’s a Mars Assaults! online game out this week on PC, and extra surprisingly, it’s a very enjoyable, if considerably tough across the edges, theme park administration recreation that performs rather a lot like a sci-fi spin on Zoo Tycoon and Two Level Hospital.
Cleverly titled Mars Attracts, this newly launched theme park administration sim permits you to abduct people from all through historical past and construct a theme park round displaying them like animals whereas additionally experimenting on them in horrible methods for science. And likewise to offer leisure to your wicked Martian visitors. And after spending a couple of hours with Mars Attracts, I’m each excited to play extra and in addition disturbed by how shortly I turned on humanity within the pursuit of constructing the good theme park on Mars.
Mars Attracts isn’t primarily based on the ’90s Mars Assaults film instantly, however as an alternative is predicated on the unique buying and selling playing cards that impressed Tim Burton’s cult basic movie, so don’t count on Pierce Brosnan and Sarah Jessica Parker to pop up at any level. As an alternative, Mars Attracts makes use of the OG card artwork and lore as its basis to construct out a wild theme park administration simulator. And all the new in-game artwork created for Mars Attracts is implausible, completely emulating the outdated look of the playing cards. I actually need a few of these loading display screen and pause menu photos printed out as massive posters.
So what do you do in Mars Attracts? Properly, you construct theme parks. However it’s not so simple as plopping down some paths, meals stalls, trash cans, and rides, and calling it a day. The Martians in Mars Attracts are coming to your park to see totally different human beings from numerous factors in historical past, just like the Wild West and Historical Rome. By means of the usage of time journey and UFOs, you ship off aliens to go acquire people and objects from a given time interval, which you then place in reveals. And whilst you have some people collected, you may as properly run experiments on them. Not solely does this please a lot of your visitors, nevertheless it additionally helps you earn the assorted analysis currencies wanted to unlock upgrades and new issues to construct. It’s much more enjoyable than researching new tech in different park builders. In these video games, I don’t even get to torture and kill one single human, not to mention dozens.
In fact, the people you acquire aren’t going to be glad about this case, so that you’ll must be sure to preserve their enclosure clear and stuffed with meals troughs and water dispensers, and never poke and prod them an excessive amount of. If a human will get too offended and needs to interrupt out, they only may, and also you’ll must name in safety to cease them.
And if in case you have an extra of human beings, you may as well simply dissect them and use their components to construct new kiosks and leisure choices to your visitors. Wish to present your Martians with balloons made out of human lungs? You are able to do simply that, when you’ve killed sufficient people. If this all sounds morbid and disgusting, don’t fear. Mars Attracts incorporates a cartoonish and foolish aesthetic that makes it simple to have time whereas torturing your human captives.
Mars Attracts is at the moment in early entry on Steam, and whereas I didn’t expertise any annoying bugs or crashes whereas constructing out my unbelievable parks throughout the sport’s first few beginning zones, I did discover some lacking textual content and a scarcity of sound results. There’s only a normal sense that the sport isn’t completed but, which is precisely what I might count on from an early entry indie recreation. I additionally felt like some components of the in-game financial system felt grindy, and it may be annoying managing provides when it appears like your staff aren’t doing what you count on. So should you want your video games to be extra feature-complete, completely balanced, and…properly…completed, then you definitely may wish to wait.
For everybody else, should you love constructing out wacky hospitals in Two Level or constructing elaborate parks in RollerCoaster Tycoon, I’d positively suggest Mars Attracts. It’s the weirdest theme park builder I’ve performed in a very long time, but additionally a implausible spin on the style that sci-fi followers and Mars Assaults lovers will take pleasure in for hours and hours.
