Memories of Mars

I want to be upfront about something before the rest of this review: the official servers for Memories of Mars shut down in June 2024, and the game was pulled from storefronts around the same time. If you've somehow landed a copy, you're looking at private or community-run dedicated servers as your only path in. That one fact shapes every sentence that follows, because this was always an online-only open-world survival game with no offline mode to fall back on. The setup has real atmosphere. You wake up as a nameless clone in a wrecked underground mining facility, with nothing in your inventory except a portable 3D printer and a question: what happened to everyone? The Martian surface waiting outside is genuinely striking, a 16-square-kilometre rust-coloured wasteland dotted with abandoned towns, industrial facilities, biodomes, and mines. Visually, the day-night cycle earns some honest praise, and stumbling across a rival player's elaborate base construction can produce a genuine wow moment. The building system is the game's clear highlight, with a structural stability mechanic that rewards smart, efficient design rather than just stacking plates until something snaps. Spending FLOPS, the combined skill-point and currency system, to unlock new modules and expand your homestead is legitimately satisfying loop work. The trouble is that everything feeding into that building loop is a slog. Resource gathering amounts to standing in front of glowing rocks and holding a button while minerals disappear in a low-animation sparkle. No fast travel compounds the tedium, since the map is vast but mostly empty, and carrying capacity limits mean constant back-and-forth between base and scavenging areas. Combat, which pits you against AI-controlled robotic spider enemies and potentially other players on PvP servers, never really fires. Weapons, of which there are several types with alternate ammo, feel weak across the board, and even upgraded gear and the occasional mech encounter do little to change that flatness. The skill tree is gated behind a single currency that creates early-game bottlenecks, and the tutorials, while thorough on paper, manage to miss genuinely critical details, like the fact that unupgraded buildings expire after two hours. Multiplayer on populated servers had its own headaches even at the game's peak. Server lag was a consistent complaint from launch onward, and PvP events arrived with essentially zero in-game explanation of their rules. The co-op angle had potential but, in practice, the PvE experience rarely needed other players beyond having someone to build alongside. With the official servers now offline, even that social glue is gone unless you and a friend are willing to set up a private dedicated server using community guides. That is very much a hobbyist exercise, not a casual drop-in. From a couch co-op or friend-group accessibility standpoint, which is normally the first question I ask, this one is a hard pass for anyone without patience for server admin work. Memories of Mars had the bones of something interesting: a Rust or ARK-adjacent survival game with a stronger aesthetic identity than most. The building kept people engaged, the Martian setting gave it a mood that generic forest-survival games can't match, and the mystery narrative provided just enough pull to keep you exploring. But the repetitive grind, floaty gunplay, and the now-dead official infrastructure mean that recommending it in any straightforward sense is genuinely difficult. If you have a small crew willing to run a private server and your idea of a good night is constructing an increasingly ridiculous space outpost while robot spiders nip at your ankles, there is a version of fun buried in here. Everyone else should look elsewhere. Riley, Scout Team