This is a driving/walking sim, but you're driving and walking on Mars. That's its biggest appeal. If the thought of exploring the Red Planet makes your inner astronaut giddy, M2030 is worth it. If, while checking out a habitat if you spot an odd rock formation in the distance and your inclination is to say "That looks cool, I wonder what's over there" you'll like this game. That's the whole game, really. Checking out the marked places on the map, planting flags, and discovering unmarked places to explore using nothing but your eyes, then figuring out how to get your bulldozer sand crawling buggy over there.

Other than that there's no real "game" to this. No fuel, no water, no resources to gather, no health, no running out of air, no combat, no alien ruins. Just exploration of an open map, getting your buggy hung up on outcroppings, planting flags and collecting samples, learning things along the way.

For me, that's what I want in an Astronaut sim. I loved Solus Project because it let me explore an alien world in VR. When I finished the plot, I really wished there was an open "tourism" mode that just let me explore the world without worrying about dehydrating or freezeing to death or getting sucked into a tornado. Mars 2030 is that experience and I'm digging it. I'm getting the same vibe while playing it that I do with games like Euro Truck. Crank up some tunes, hop in the rover and watch the sun rise and the shadows crawl across the land. It will probably take 10 or so hours to make the rounds and see all the sites, and as of right now I'm looking forward to the trip.

The rover is a ♥♥♥♥♥, though, until you get the hang of it. Then, it's actually fun to drive cross country. But if you don't like it, there's an autopilot to waypoints, or fast travel.

Locomotion was also built with flexibility. You have trackpad locomotion with sprinting and jumping. (Bounding around in low gravity is a blast). But if that kind of movement makes you queasy, teleport to your hearts desire with a different button. Your call.

(Important note: Roomscale is not officially supported. You can move from your center position and look around things, but you will clip through walls and if you look behind you'll see your body doing some very weird things. Also, if you have a HUD like while in a space suit, it will be invisible until you move back to the center point where it expects your head to be.)

The graphics and sound are excellent. I'd put the graphics and VR quality about on par with the Everest VR experience, except that Mars 2030 gives you the freedom to explore the entire map and discover things on your own. I've not seen any popup or texture issues. Everything feels solid and real - well almost. I did clip through the giant wreck of the heat shield that got ejected during landing. But everything else, the habitat, the Mars rover and the terrain are all detailed and convincing. The terrain itself is very well done. No repeating textures or procedural repitition so far. The day and night cycles are beautiful to watch, and getting caught in the open during a dust storm was an appropriately unsettling experience.

So - I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a chill exploration simulation or space geeks looking to play astronaut. It's a very polished VR experience far beyond what you'd get in Destinations. But go into it knowing exploration is the only goal - anybody looking for base building, resource gathering or alien life should look elsewhere.

I have about 17 hours into this game now. I absolutely love playing. The idea of exploring a real site on mars is pretty cool. I've enjoyed it, and put up with all the bad along with the good. With that said, its probably obvious I'm pretty biased due to the fact that a collaboration with NASA for the accuracy is pretty awesome. I love the game, but, read on.

I would highly recommend you wait to purchase this $14.99 game for when it goes on a deep sale. There are many frustrating bugs, which will I admit seem to be addressed slowly, but are the epitome of what you would expect for an alpha or early beta level game. I had probably 3 or 4 hours into a game when a game save bug popped its ugly head (save restore caused me to fall through the map), making it impossible to continue that save. Devs claim that now has been resolve, and I haven't had that issue again, but have started over from the beginning due to the save being corrupt and unusable.

The next problem is the fact that every time I restore a game save, the beginning dialog trek from landing to the habitat base including, but not limited to, the first communications from earth on the safe landing repeats itself. Shouldn't be there, should have been resolved long long ago.

If you are far away from the habitat in your rover when you quit the game, your restore may put you quite a long trek away from your rover. Remember where you place your rover when you quit, for you may find yourself hoofing across the martian surface in search of your ride (If you are prone to panic abandonment issues, be prepared for this, lol).

There seems to be a lot of ground level flaws, false images, and may find yourself walking in mid air on some rock tops or areas. I also still experience double images which allow you to look under a surface map, seeing a second below it. While 40 square kilometers of surface area is a lot of room to create a world with, there seems to be a great deal of visual flaws in rock or sand areas.

Its also quite common to become stranded in your rover while using the “auto drive” function from one area to another. I often get stuck in sand, along rock sides, or cliff areas. You can go to the map and “fast travel” to get out of it, but seems to be sloppy to me to have to do that.

The game is more akin to a “free learning” type game you would find for free on the NASA site, than it does a pay steam game. The $14.99 asked is probably reasonable if they would resolve all the annoying bugs and visual flaws.

Another “head scratching” thing about the game, which doesn't get in the way of play, is you seem to have the mars surface populated by women and this one lonely man. Probably a male nerds fantasy, and I'm perfectly ok with it. Just seems unrealistic to me, and not sure why they did it.

So, to sum it up. If you just want to explore mars somewhat realistically, and don't care about game play, skill level questing, and don't mind hours of walking and riding to go from place to place. You'll probably enjoy it. If you are looking for any skilled activity, a clean game free of bugs, and has game rewards, you'll hate it.

This should be a free demo only. Nothing interesting to pay for it. There are some good mechannics like driving the vehicle with a virtual joystick by using VR contollers. That's it. You visit the habitats and read what they are planned for. There is no interaction, no gaming, no mission etc. Even you can't grab objects around you except some rocks on the ground.

To me it can be just another VR experince if only it is free if you want to walk around for a few minutes before deleting it. Plus, it cause motion sickness. I already asked for a refund.

https://youtu.be/SBzvkRdIcfY

I really don't want to be too hard on Mars 2030 because I love the concept a realistic and educational Mars simulator, as well as respect that the developers are giving the game away free to students and educators, but sadly I had a disappointing experience with the game. The game is a pure open world exploration game, with the emphasis being placed on the player to make their own fun exploring the accurately-mapped Martian landscape, planting flags, collecting samples and trying not to get wrecked in the sandstorms. This is the hook that really gets me because I'm a huge space fanatic, though some players who are looking for more of a traditional gaming experience might not like the lack of objectives and direction.

So, graphically, on higher settings the game looks great; beautiful landscapes and some really nice touches like footprints in the sand, but actually the graphics are where one of my issues comes in. I have no idea what's going on, but this game seems to have some real performance challenges. Even with my Titan card and the graphics set to auto, I was experiencing some judder in certain places. Mainly it would come from any fast motion such as running or quickly rotating, where there was a perceivable lag of couple of milliseconds, leading to a jarring experience as well as contributing the VR sickness factor. I also experienced some other graphical anomalies that seem related to the 3D itself. It's hard to describe, but it is like the image has some strange warping effect going on, where shadows would move and bend in the corner of your eye, but when you look at them they are fine. I found the same was true for the text in the game; looking at it head on looks great but any sections in the corner of your eye seems weird until you look directly at it.

The other element of the game that got me was the controls. I was using the Touch controllers and for the most part they are intuitive, but the disconnect came from how they work with the in-game model; For the most part it seemed the controller motions are 1:1 but then sometimes my hands seemed to shoot out and snap to objects. I think another element that was off-putting for me was that the character model felt slightly off in scale. It's very cool you can see your body and legs but even using the 'recenter view' button my shoulders and chest felt huge while my arms and legs felt stubby. I had a long commentary written on the original Rover vehicle controls which are wacky, but actually since I start writing this review a patch has been released simplifying the Rover controls, so that is great news! Slick timing!

In terms of comfort, I have to say Mars 2030 factors high in VR sickness for me. The combination of all the aforementioned graphical anomalies, judder and controller wackiness led me to have to cut short my playthroughs for fear that I would actually get sick. One good thing to point out is that there is an alternate teleport/snap turn control scheme which does help reduce motion sickness somewhat. It's very disappointing to me that this was my experience with Mars 2030 because I really do love the idea and genuinely hope the developers overcome the development challenges to make an awesome Mars simulation experience. This game isn't an Early Access title, but the good news is the developers are still very active on the forums, responding to players technical issues, taking feedback and actively patching the game, so it seems like they are fully invested in making this a better game. So although this is a not recommended from me right now, I'm holding out hope that the game will eventually reach its goal through the perseverance of its developers.

I only just recommend this if played in VR. The fact you are travelling over terrain simulated from satellite images from NASA really makes this a good experience. There is a whole lot more that could have been done with this game but never was. Pick it up if you have VR and it is on sale.
One note however. What is it with todays generation of games? 80% of the heroes are women, the toughest characters are women, men are portrayed as weaker. Is this the ♥♥♥♥♥ generation we are existing with now? Do boys really want to run around as women in these games? I fully support gender equality but for God's sake give them the option to choose to be a male or female. So in this game what do we have? You are a female character and not only that, all the other astronauts in the base are female. Totally unrealistic and destroys immersion. Jesus, just shoot all us men if you think we are all redundant. Especially if you are a so-called privileged white heterosexual male. It seems genocide has been declared on that group for years. Rant over.

Game isn't ready yet. Needs some updates to clean up control issues and framerates.
Love the scale.
Love the environment.
Love the concept.
Willing to be patient and anticipating an experience I've been waiting for since Spacecamp.

Good educational experience - you'll learn about Mars, plans for manned exploration of Mars, technology, etc. Unlike most of the other educational VR apps I've seen on Steam, this one actually has a fair bit of content to it: most I can see/do everything in 15 minutes (or less), but this...well, let's just say that they aren't kidding when they say there's 40 square kilometers of real Martian terrain to explore. Just don't go expecting anything crazy like alien ruins or a story or anything like that.

That said, its biggest weakness is immersion. You're supposed to be part of the first manned mission to Mars, but once you arrive at the habitat, there are no further goals, the other astronauts don't talk to you (or each other), they're always in the same place doing the same thing, Mission Control sends no further messages, etc. You're free to come and go from the habitat as you please. You also do everything solo without even so much as radioing the habitat every once in a while to let them know what you're up to, which is very unrealistic. I think some banter lines for the astronauts and finding them at different places in the habitat depending on the time of day (or sol, I guess, in this case) could go a long way. If the devs wanted to really go the extra mile, maybe throw in the occasional random task like solar array repair after a dust devil (surely some excuse could be made as to why the robots couldn't do it) or something.

Either way, if you're seriously interested in Mars and/or education in general, this is a good app!

I guess the game is about exploring mars after a nice intro or something, but the game itself is ok, If ya wanna learn about mars and space, then this is for you, but so far its flag planting sim for me, and I still suck at driving the rover, so with it at auto pilot, its a sleeping in a moveing truck sim for a little bit, still nice to look at, but this needs a resenter button, my body gets so messed up when I get out of my chair, and its only because of the rover bit, where you stear with a joy stick

This is an amazing experience. You do not need to go to Mars to find out how it looks on the surface. Use this simulation instead. This is how I imagine Mars should look like. I have followed rover exploration on Mars over the years and looked at stereoscopic images using cyan-red glasses and fantasized about being on the surface. Now I can be there. The sun have the right size. The color of the sky is pink or rust colored and not an enhanced blue. Really happy about this. And there is a great area to explore. I bought this game after the 1.1 update and did not have any performance issues. I have a gtx 1080, so I am perhaps not the best person to review this. There are still some issues with this simulation. You are more sensitive to small deviations since this is VR. Shadows sometimes moving with your gaze instead of the angle of the sun, your legs hanging akwardly bent beneath you and hands looking a little twisted. Small things that need to be polished to feel right. Otherwise the scale seem right. And I could bump around in the rover for over an hour without getting sick. It felt right. I use Oculus Rift. The pros are far greater than the cons. Recommended.

I was looking forward to this title. I was disappointed. It didn't feel scientific at all. Very basic elementary level of learning about first human mission to Mars. Very simplified explanations of equipment layouts and Mars site plans. Awkward controls and movements both when walking and driving vehicles. Equipment and interfaces you interact with are very simplified and dumbed down. Sattllite photo and terrain elevation data was appealing. There are quite a few sites to visit. But, amount of information you learn and activities you get to do at each location is very limited. Most of it is warp or drive to a site then plant a flag, then go to the next location, plant a flag.