There have been quite a few surprising titles to come across my review desk this year. Though I have prefaced many of them by saying this, there really couldn’t have been any more unexpected of a title to release this year than Mars Attracts, an amusement park manager built around the incredibly iconic 1996 comedy horror Mars Attacks. While the Tim Burton classic is certainly timeless, I would have expected the window for such a game to be long since gone. To my surprise, however, the title simply works, and even in its Early Access state, it has quite a bit to offer for fans of the original and new fans that will inevitably be born from this fun little zoo game.
If you’re familiar with the classic film, you might expect a Mars Attacks game to be some kind of RTS conquest or defense of the Earth, or perhaps an FPS game of some sort with a comedic twist to it. Mars Attracts, however, defies expectations and takes us into the rarer genre of amusement park management, tasking players with creating a human-themed park for Martian visitors to enjoy.
The gameplay loop is pretty straightforward. Enclosures are built throughout your theme park and made to match themes from human history, such as the Wild West or Ancient Rome (or at least, the Martian interpretation of these periods), and stocked with several amenities such as human-sized hamster wheels and stiff steel beds for their inhabitants to sleep on. Said inhabitants are abducted from Earth and placed into the exhibits for the viewing pleasure of your Martian guests. Essentially, you’re running a human zoo, with other attractions thrown in here and there to keep your guests entertained.
The comedic premise of running a human zoo is both a main attraction of the game and one that Mars Attracts doesn’t shy away from in the slightest. I am incredibly grateful to the developers for taking the ridiculousness and humor of this idea and stretching it to the max; there’s nothing quite like watching someone shove their face into a trough full of slop made to poorly mimic the aesthetic of Ancient Rome.
Something I find interesting about the game is that the basic gameplay loop evolves past keeping your guests entertained and your zoo captives happy. This is built around the game’s Mars Attacks origin, where the Martians themselves are shown to be decidedly cruel. Because of this, you have to actually satisfy the cruelty of your park guests, meaning that some humans you keep captive should purposefully be kept unhappy. You have goals to reach for both cruelty and “cultural” satisfaction, which are opposite ends of the spectrum and both require planning to satisfy.
You wouldn’t be an alien from the deep recesses of space if the humans you abducted weren’t used for strange experiments, which is something you can and often must do in your Mars Attracts park. Scientists are employed to study your human captives, and experiments are done to earn points to advance on the tech tree and to understand each environment of humans you keep locked up. The best part about this is that these experiments are fully animated for your viewing pleasure, adding a bit of slapstick comedy, light gore, and body horror that fans of the original film praised it for.
Beyond the decidedly Mars Attacks themes in the gameplay, Mars Attracts plays very similar to other park management games. You need to build facilities to handle guest needs, decorate the park to increase its appeal, and sell amenities to guests to turn a profit. It’s in these features that the Early Access version of the game is the lightest, and decorations especially could use a lot of expansion and reworking. I would appreciate it if the game allowed you to clip certain decorations together to create walls to block the view of areas guests aren’t supposed to see, and to increase the amount of creative freedom you have in decorating the park overall. We could also just use a lot more decorations in general, but it was clear the developers wanted to add other aspects to the game first before touching on this area.
As far as bugs go, which you can often expect from an Early Access game, I’m surprised to say that Mars Attracts was pleasantly free of them. Everything ran smoothly, and the game’s file size of just over 1 GB was shocking with the bloated sizes you often find in modern games. Of course, the main content is still a work in progress, and I found that more than anything, the game desperately needs more sound. Conducting experiments on humans in total silence or watching mute crowds move through your park undercuts the atmosphere quite a bit, but I expect this to be something that gets added soon.
Mars Attracts is one of those strange little titles that shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does, and yet it manages to carve out a space for itself with charm, humor, and just the right amount of grotesque absurdity. Even in its Early Access state, there’s already enough here to keep you entertained while also leaving plenty of room for growth, and if the developers can polish up its weaker areas, this could end up being a standout management sim that no one saw coming.
Pros
- Unique concept with a strong connection to Mars Attacks’ humor and tone.
- Smooth performance with very few bugs for Early Access.
- Satisfying balance of classic park management gameplay and uniquely twisted alien mechanics.
Cons
- Early Access content feels thin in certain areas, especially in decorating your park.
- Lacks sufficient sound design in the current version.
- Some features feel underdeveloped and in need of expansion.
TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Mars Attracts. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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