I liked Ship Us the Moon. I assumed it was completely paced and full of partaking 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 incorporates a a lot bigger finances. 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 value taking part in for followers however it merely isn’t as gratifying an expertise.
Ship Us Mars switches protagonists, which gained’t come as a shock for the reason that 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 to 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 so as to save the planet from its existential disaster.
The story stays partaking, solely it’s offered another way. The earlier recreation didn’t have the cash for character faces and cutscenes, so the story was utterly delivered by holograms and audio information. Ship Us Mars has character fashions for the whole most important forged, plus bigger, more-detailed areas to maneuver round in. However there’s a giant drawback. The character faces look sort of terrible. They’re both bizarre or unusually old-looking and facial animations are lower than stellar.
What did you do to your hair?
The hair is the worst, although. Once we first meet Kathy as a toddler, 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 connected to nothing. I used to be shocked no one tried to enhance this earlier than launch. No less than the voice performing is pretty much as good because it was earlier than. The forged does an awesome 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, however it undoubtedly feels prefer it meanders in comparison with the final go round.
Ship Us Mars has a group of various gameplay types. You stroll round and search for issues to work together with, generally float round or swim in first-person, drive a rover, lower issues aside with a laser, climb, platform, and resolve a few varieties of puzzles. However whereas Ship Us the Moon continuously saved issues contemporary and efficiently made every goal really feel significant, Ship Us Mars is filled with fluff that doesn’t really feel wherever close to as very important.
That is merely a slower journey versus the tight pacing you might expect. And there are such a lot of instances when it’s important to cease what you’re doing to slowly use pickaxes to climb some partitions or goal a laser to resolve a puzzle. These two issues are regurgitated again and again. The climbing is pretty intelligent even when it’s usually considerably boring. You must slam each pickaxes right into a wall to climb it earlier than swapping forwards and backwards between them to slowly make headway. However it may be a bit of clunky, particularly in the case of leaping backward. The primary time the sport requested me to do that, I had no thought it was even potential as the sport by no means teaches you about it. I’m not even totally certain the way it works.
Not one other laser puzzle
However whereas the climbing is tolerable and infrequently 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 sophisticated as the sport goes on, requiring you to make use of splitters and energy dampeners to succeed in a number of mills without delay. These puzzles are okay, however they’re not all that enjoyable and there are just too a lot of them.
Then there are the hologram puzzles. Ship Us the Moon had ASE holograms you’d work together with to observe a recording of a scene play out and people return. However now you have to resolve one-to-three decryption puzzles to view them. These puzzles are pretty poor, as they solely include transferring your ASE round to attempt to get three yellow locks to enter a hologram and switch blue. The sport doesn’t even remotely try to elucidate how they work and so they actually haven’t any enterprise being within the recreation in any respect.
And that’s the largest drawback with Ship Us Mars. It desires to be a beefier recreation, however it pads itself out with meaningless filler to try this, which makes it a far cry from the targeted expertise the primary recreation offered. It’s wonderful 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 a couple of event, I couldn’t even begin the decryption puzzles to observe holograms. It’s also possible to utterly skip the primary main climbing part by rigorously leaping down a mountain.
It doesn’t assist that the sport’s characters is usually a bit laborious to narrate to and that the speedy objectives simply aren’t all that fascinating. I had a reasonably first rate time with the sport total as a result of story, however I can’t assist however really feel disenchanted that the sequel to a recreation I liked a lot simply didn’t hit the identical notes. Followers will discover it value a playthrough however shouldn’t anticipate the identical degree of exhilaration and narrative funding that its predecessor offered. It was strive, however the devs simply didn’t ship us an equal expertise this time round. Possibly the third recreation will get us there.