Mars: War Logs Review
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If the premise sounds interesting to you, I should let you you know right away: the folks at SPIDERS never did anything interesting with it. And the same can be said with many other elements of the game that sounded interesting on paper. Simply put, Mars: War Logs is a completely mediocre game that, quite frankly, isn't worth the player's time. Keep reading to find out why...
Story and writing
In Mars: War Logs you play as Roy Temperance, a renegade Technomancer turned prisoner of war, currently detained in a prison camp. Roy is a member of the Aurora guild, one of the four water guilds on Mars and the youngest, currently at war with Abundance, the oldest and largest. After a brief first chapter set in the prison camp, where you get to meet your NPC companion Innocence Smith, also writer of the titular war logs (which the game mercifully references as war diary), the war ends abruptly, and the story turns into one of resistance against the evil dictatorship that Aurora has become.
While the premise is fairly interesting, frankly speaking neither the story nor the moment-to-moment dialogue writing are any good. Characters have flat, one-note personalities and dull, character-less dialogue which also often features bad grammar and doesn't make any sense whatsoever (the game opens with the line "I never really though I'd end up in the middle of the war, but didn't really understand how"), and the actual plot is rushed, poorly-paced and doesn't develop organically at all.
You can influence your companion personalities through dialogue, there are choices and (minor) consequences (more on that later on), an interesting setting, and the story takes twists and turns here and there, so theoretically SPIDERS had all the ingredients to make a worthy story. Unfortunately, the results are barely noteworthy at all, and only because at times the execution is downright awful.
Progression and itemization
While the attributes tab of the interface presents a lot of stats upfront and might fool players approaching the game, Mars: War Logs presents a fairly simple character system. At every level you gain 2 points to put in one of your three skill trees and one point to buy a feat. Skill trees are divided into Combat, which is melee-oriented and by far the most useful category in my experience, Renegade, which focuses on stealth and dirty tricks, and Technomancy, which only gets unlocked after the first chapter and offers an array of electricity-based abilities, essentially filling the role of magic. Every ability has three tiers, and most of the upgrades feel like they make a difference, which is nice. Some abilities are also locked and unavailable to purchase until you've put enough points into their skill tree, forcing you to commit to one of the three at least to a certain degree.
Feats, on the other hand, are similar to their namesake in Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and perks in Fallout, with the notable difference that the most powerful ones require more points to buy and also have some attached requirements such as killing enough enemies, or crafting enough items. Some of them offer passive bonuses such as increased combat experience points, while others have more tangible effects, like unlocking new items for your crafting list (this is the only way you can expand it, as there are no recipes in the game). Finally, there are also some feats that are tied to your reputation, and get awarded automatically when you reach that level. Therefore bad characters are more likely to crit, while the most upstanding players will be rewarded with companions that are far stronger and more resilient in combat.
Speaking of crafting, this is, while imperfect, one of the few points where the game feels genuinely interesting and enjoyable. While the items list is fairly small and the loot power progression is arguably linear, most items can be improved via crafting. The game features a vast array of upgrades, with bonuses such as increased critical chance, increased wounding chance, electrical damage, better blocking, increased Fluid and Health regeneration, electrical damage resistance and more. Overall, neither weapons nor armors have a be-all and end-all option, and I found myself upgrading a few variants of the same weapon and armor instead of selling them to be sure I could handle every situation. On top of this, there's also a crafting kit with which you can craft ammo for your nailgun, convert crafting materials and make Fluid and Health injections.
That said, even crafting has two critical flaws. First of all, there's simply too much loot lying around. The game's areas are chock-full of containers and junk, and even your enemies often carry quite a few materials with them. This greatly reduces the weight of your choices, as you usually always have some excess crafting materials to spare to change the tip of your current weapon, or get those Technomancer pauldrons you were eyeing earlier before going for a cheaper alternative. Secondly, and this actually surprised me quite a bit, you can craft during combat. Should I have found myself about to die and out of health injections while I was playing the game, I'd simply hit I, open my crafting kit tab and craft a few to use. I'm not sure if this was intended or simply an oversight, but it did trivialize the toughest encounters. That's never good.
Gameplay and combat
If you're not reading dialogue, interacting with other NPCs or looting containers in Mars: War Logs, that likely means you're fighting. And luckily, given that the game is quite encounter-heavy, the combat system is competent. Your basic palette of moves consists of melee attacks (the left mouse button when using a mouse and keyboard, X on the Xbox 360 gamepad) which you can string in short combos, parrying (right mouse button/B), a roll dodge (space bar/A) and a guard-breaking attack (F/Y). In addition to these moves you'll also unlock new abilities which you can tie to your hotkeys, or access from the "tactics menu" (Q/RB), which slows down time and allows you to select from all your available abilities or assign orders to your companions. Some of the abilities you use have their own resources: using the nail gun consumes ammo, while every single ability in the Technomancy tree consumes Fluid, the game's mana equivalent.
The controls are responsive, and the enemies' behaviors are well differentiated, so fighting is fun in short bursts. The folks at SPIDERS must have had a higher opinion of the combat system than me though, because combat isn't doled out in short, significant bursts, and is, on the contrary, way too frequent. Just walking around there's a high chance that you'd eventually meet some enemies, and while most encounters aren't exactly difficult, they're also not mindless or fast enough to make up for their number, raising the suspicion that they've simply been placed there to provide some padding in an already short game.
There are also other problems with combat, as you might have guessed by now: fighting groups of enemies basically requires rolling around the arena to avoid being stunlocked, as enemies alternate between normal and guard-breaking attacks and there's no way to parry both at the same time; your companions' AI (you can carry one with you at a time) is fairly bad, meaning that they'll often die earlier than you even if you assign orders to them, and that they'll send AoE attacks while you in the middle, the only upside being that enemies are usually equally stupid and end up catching allies in their own attacks too; lock-on can be fiddly, and some areas are too cramped for the mobility combat requires, so you might find the camera in a less-than-desirable spot while rolling around avoiding enemy attacks. I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting, but what I'm getting at is that, while competent, Mars: War Logs' combat is nothing to write home about either.
You might also want to try using stealth instead of combat to get through some of the most obnoxious encounters, but it should be noted that the system is very simple, and areas aren't really designed with an actual stealth path in mind, with very few exceptions. Mixed with some of the dirty tricks-like abilities of the Renegade skill tree it amounts to another way to dispatch enemies, with less rolling and parrying and more backstabbing.
A few side notes: companions can't be killed and only fall unconscious, just to get back up and regenerate to full Health when combat is finished. Your Health and Fluid also regenerate both in and out of combat, though regeneration during combat is barely perceptible unless boosted via passive abilities and equipment. Health and Fluid injections provide a significant time-limited boost to this passive regeneration rather than outright giving you back a set amount of Health/Fluid, meaning that they're only useful in combat to get you out of a tight spot.
Quest design and morality systems
In terms of quest design, Mars: War Logs doesn't exactly shine, though there are a few good points to be cited. First of all, some quest can be failed, completely or partially, either by taking the wrong choice or simply not playing well enough (for example, one quest assigned me to escort one person to a bank, but while I ultimately managed to defeat all the enemies and take the money to the bank, the man I was escorting fell behind and was killed by bandits).
Secondly, quests often have multiple solutions, if not exactly particularly imaginative ones. With few exceptions, you're given the chance to intimidate or bluff where it makes sense, decide who to help in a situation, and walk out when you don't feel like pressing on with a task. Thirdly, while the game still features the ubiquitous quest markers and "I'll mark the location on your map!" dialogue lines, there's far less handholding than titles such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It was actually refreshing to get an investigation quest with the only direction being "find clues" and no quest markers at all.
Lastly, consequences are developed organically, rather than by flashing influence updates in your interface or such things. Help someone and maybe he or she will help you down the line, without much fanfare. I know this will personally not be to everyone's tastes, as there's certainly a segment of players that enjoys the greater degree of transparency brought by influence/reputation gauges and such, but I personally enjoyed it. Besides, Mars: War Logs is short and compact enough (both in terms of actual length and area design) that I never really needed a tab to keep track of the people who hated me or loved me.
That said, it should be kept in mind that, while I praised some aspects of the quest design, the game is still chock-full of tasks such as fetch quests and clearing areas of enemies, and that even the best quests are still hardly memorable. At its best, quest design feels closer to a smaller, less ambitious Gothic title, rather than, say, Fallout 2 or Arcanum.
Speaking of comparisons, Mars: War Logs' simple morality system strongly reminded me of the Light Side/Dark Side gauge in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the original implementation of Karma in the first Fallout title (the manual even calls it Karma instead of Reputation). Stripped down to its basics, you are awarded positive Reputation when you do good deeds, and negative Reputation when you do bad deeds, though exactly how much Reputation you gain or lose, or even if you gain or lose Reputation at all isn't shown in the interface. The only indicator is your total Reputation in the character sheet.
All things considered, there are far more opportunities to be a bad guy than a good guy, given that every time you defeat an enemy you're given the option to kill them by extracting their serum (water essentially) with a syringe. Serum is both the game's currency and also a crafting ingredient necessary to craft injections, so this is theoretically rather practical, but there is already more than enough serum lying around to make this option mostly flavour. Besides, when experimenting with the game's Reputation system, getting to the "Bad" Reputation level took me a lot of time and killing, and doing a single quest was enough to go back to "Neutral".
Music and art
In terms of atmosphere Mars: War Logs is well done, especially considering its obvious low budget. The soundtrack combines some electronic themes with some very low-key ambient, and is never intrusive, but rather subtly influences and enhances the mood. The voice acting, however, is downright awful, and I suggest everyone who wishes to play the game to just read the subtitles and skip the dialogue. Art-wise the game presents a fairly industrial utilitarian vision of sci-fi that sometimes borders on post-apocalyptic, with a few minor cyberpunk influences such as the technomancers' character designs. Both understandably and unfortunately, the developers had to reuse a lot of the same assets over and over, throughout the entirety of the game, leading to some visual fatigue by the end of the game.
It doesn't help that SPIDERS' artists also used very similar lighting/palettes for most of the areas, a sort of brown-red filter that might well convey the popular image of Mars, but grows incredibly tiresome a few hours into the game. At least for the interior/underground areas, a splash of colors, or even a bit of grey here and there would have helped a lot. By the end of the game the tune changes a bit, with the last big hub featuring a bit more green and the final area having a more polished, high-tech feel, but it's too little, too late.
In purely technical terms, it has to be said that the game is not exactly a stunner and looks a bit dated, but it'd also be hard for me to call it outright ugly.
Performance and polish
On my now 4-year-old machine Mars: War Logs ran rather well, with very few framerate dips and bugs, and only one crash that I recall during the 13 hours it took me to complete the game. Unfortunately, moving away from these purely technical aspects, it's easy to see how unpolished the game actually is. The interface is terrible, whether you're playing with mouse and keyboard or a gamepad. Even the simplest things take more than a few clicks (e.g. attributes are all separated in their own sub-menus, instead of being shown on a sheet). Shortcuts can be used to enter menus but not to leave them. There's no way to select a quantity of items you want to buy or craft. You can only visualize 4 of the 9 available hotkeys for your abilities in your normal interface. There are probably some other problems I didn't remember to note down, but this should already offer a pretty solid idea of how little there is to enjoy about it.
There's a host of problems with the controls and camera too. You can't customize keybinds, neither with mouse and keyboard nor with gamepad. Speaking of the gamepad's control scheme, there are some annoyances with it too. Specifically, running and moving the camera at the same time is arguably impossible unless the way you hold your controller is highly unorthodox, given that A is the running button and you move the camera with the right analog. You'll need to move the camera often too as there's no auto-correct. Finally, there are three different keys to handle interactions (E to talk with companions, R to transition to another area, and the left mouse button to talk to normal NPCs and open containers and normal doors) when one would suffice.
The game's narrative also seems to be inconsistent in terms of continuity: sometimes companion forget what they've seen while they were with me, other times my protagonist magically discovered things that had never been mentioned to him before, like the actual identity of the lost brother of one NPC. There are only 50 slots available to save the game. Collisions seem to be quite random too, as quite a few times I ran into a tight but arguably walkable point to discover an invisible wall, while other times some hidden nooks and cranny didn't look accessible, but actually were.
Conclusions
European low-budget role-playing games tend to be games of highs and lows, often incredibly unpolished, clunky and with some broken mechanics, but also laden with surprising details and secrets, neat, forward-thinking mechanics and a hardcore attitude that the big-budget productions have completely forgotten by now.
Mars: War Logs, however, is not that kind of game. It's a game of flat, even mediocrity, that might not sink quite as low and be as broken as those niche titles I mentioned earlier, but doesn't have any of their highs either. Sure, there are a few neat ideas, but it's not enough. Ultimately, Mars: War Logs is as dull and barren as the planet it takes places on.
