This is really the main challenge of the game, beyond building a sustainable colony. The botanist becomes the most important colonist, though, as they are the only ones who can actually grow plants and feed your colony.Īs you progress you aim to achieve milestones, unlocking the more difficult planets. The worker will carry out the very basic tasks, work in your mine to harvest minerals, produce basic metals and plastics, or move materials between areas in your base. Each colonist has a specific role: the worker, engineer, botanist, medics, and guards. You start each game with your lander coming in and touching down on the hostile world, with your colonists disembarking in their space suits. Interestingly, you can then select your landing zone, which should mean there is some kind of replay value as the terrain will be randomly generated. You can select from three planets in the current build of the game, a class D (desert), F (frozen), and M (moon), progressing in terms of difficulty.

Planetbase opens with your colony ship in orbit above a planet making its approach to land. The real-time strategy lacks any story, but this isn’t much of an issue when you consider it’s more of a simulation than your typical RTS game. Planetbase, from Madruga Works, puts you in the space suits of a small number of explorers as they establish colonies on a number of inhospitable planets. How easy would it be though? If we could send a group of adventurers, a couple of robots, and tons of supplies to Mars, would they survive? Well, in Planetbase you can find out.

Now when you watch the news you’ll hear the odd story about the first human exploration of Mars the idea has become part of popular culture in a big way over the last few years and we may not even be that far away from doing just that.

When we take time out from murdering each other. Sadly that little robot only lasted a few months and yet at 26 years old, almost two decades later, I watched the news (on my incredibly advanced smart phone) as “we” landed a rover the size of a car on the surface of a planet hundreds of millions of kilometres away. I remember as a kid of ten in 1997, obsessed with all things space and hearing about the probe “we” had landed on Mars, the Mars Pathfinder mission, and the little robot ‘ Sojourner’, thinking this is the greatest thing we had ever done. You don’t really get a sense of it until you sit back and look at where we once were and where we are now. Technology has progressed at warp speed over the last few decades.

Planetbase morale