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 helps 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 in addition to offer leisure to your wicked Martian visitors. And after spending just a few 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 best theme park on Mars.
Mars Attracts isn’t based mostly on the ’90s Mars Assaults film straight, however as an alternative is predicated on the unique buying and selling playing cards that impressed Tim Burton’s cult traditional movie, so don’t anticipate Pierce Brosnan and Sarah Jessica Parker to pop up at any level. As a substitute, 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 incredible, completely emulating the previous look of the playing cards. I actually need a few of these loading display and pause menu pictures printed out as massive posters.
So what do you do in Mars Attracts? Properly, you construct theme parks. But it surely’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 completely different human beings from varied factors in historical past, just like the Wild West and Historic Rome. By way of the usage of time journey and UFOs, you ship off aliens to go gather people and gadgets from a given time interval, which you then place in displays. And whilst you have some people collected, you would possibly as properly run experiments on them. Not solely does this please a lot of your visitors, nevertheless it additionally helps you earn the varied 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 gather aren’t going to be pleased about this case, so that you’ll must be sure you 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 desires to interrupt out, they only would possibly, and also you’ll must name in safety to cease them.
And when you have an extra of human beings, you may as well simply dissect them and use their elements to construct new kiosks and leisure choices in 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 includes a cartoonish and foolish aesthetic that makes it simple to have a great 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 an absence of sound results. There’s only a basic sense that the sport isn’t completed but, which is precisely what I might anticipate from an early entry indie recreation. I additionally felt like some elements of the in-game economic system felt grindy, and it may be annoying managing provides when it looks like your employees aren’t doing what you anticipate. So should you want your video games to be extra feature-complete, completely balanced, and…properly…completed, you then would possibly 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 advocate Mars Attracts. It’s the weirdest theme park builder I’ve performed in a very long time, but in addition a incredible spin on the style that sci-fi followers and Mars Assaults lovers will take pleasure in for hours and hours.
