My little rover, roving all over
This has been the year of physics in games, what with our Zeldas and our Viewfinders. Mars First Logistics, from developer Shape Shop, takes what we’ve been learning and throws it out through the vastness of space, onto our little red (sometimes blue?) neighbor, Mars, to leave us fending for ourselves.
And boy is it silly fun.
In the game we take control of what I’ll affectionately call “Everyone’s Delivery Rover” with our only task being delivering things around the planet. The game is focused on the physics, with movement on the rocky planet bouncing us up and around. It’s lower gravity, so the movement is often chaotic, but appreciated.
The general gameplay has us taking on small quests and story-specific missions using our rover to pick things up and put them down. Depending on the item, we might need to update our little guy with claws, longer arms, thrusters, or a variety of other mods that we can find or buy, which we can save and easily create in our builder menu system. The game also gives us blueprints, so we can quickly try out new builds. It’s nice to be able to spawn a hauler right away, or add thrusters to the rover for no reason but to try and flip it down Martian hills.
The game’s still in Early Access, and the dev team has at least a year’s worth of content planned, but there’s always something new to do. Like moving a beach ball to a warehouse! A beach ball. Filled with air. On Mars.
Don’t concern yourself with how that works.
Mars First Logistics is a silly, physics-based space toy, and the Technics-style building aspect is parts educational and parts engineering, but it’s always got us making weird contraptions to solve problems in the strangest, most fun ways.
This review is based on a Steam Code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. The video first appeared on the June 23rd episode of The SideQuest. All images and video courtesy Shape Shop.
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