Surviving Mars: Space Race Plus (DLC)

Space Race Plus is not a standalone game. Park that expectation immediately. It is a DLC bundle for Haemimont Games' colony-builder Surviving Mars, and it lives or dies by how much mileage you are already getting from the base experience. What it adds, mechanically, is a competitive layer: up to four AI-controlled rival colonies land on Mars alongside you, each backed by their own sponsor, racing toward the same milestone objectives you are chasing. If a rival plants their flag on a milestone first, that objective is locked out for you. Build faster, build smarter, or watch the prestige points bleed away to a Japanese drone operation running laps around your oxygen budget. The headline additions break down into three buckets. First, the competitive AI colonies themselves, complete with a trading space dock that lets you exchange resources directly with rivals instead of waiting on slow Earth resupply rockets. Second, two brand-new sponsor nations in Japan and Brazil, each carrying asymmetric bonuses and penalties that genuinely change your opening build order. Japan hands you faster drones and automated metal extractors that need no workers, but tightens your colonist cap hard. Brazil subsidises each arriving colonist and lets you build dome connectors instantly, which is a bigger quality-of-life bonus than it sounds when you are managing eight domes and a dust storm at the same time. Third, the Space Race Plus bundle specifically adds the Colony Design Set (25 new functional buildings and cosmetic options) and the Marsvision Song Contest radio pack, a Eurovision parody that pipes sponsor-flavored music into your sessions. The radio is filler. The 25 buildings are not. Here is the honest systems-level read. The rival colonies are not a proper grand-strategy competitive AI. They do not raid you, they cannot sabotage your domes, and direct interaction stays limited to milestone comparisons and the occasional diplomatic message. Think of them less as opponents and more as a persistent external pressure gauge, a number on a leaderboard that forces you to keep momentum instead of plateauing in a comfortable mid-game holding pattern. For players who already know the base game's oxygen-and-power loops cold, that pressure is genuinely useful. For newcomers still learning why their colonists keep going insane during dust storms, the rival notifications are background noise. There is also a sponsor objective system bolted onto every faction, old and new. Each sponsor now ships with a unique goal tree, and completing those objectives unlocks rewards that compound nicely with your existing build strategy. These tasks are usually aligned with things you were doing anyway, which means the reward cadence feels natural rather than grindy. Random narrative events added with this DLC inject extra friction and occasional absurdity, including one infamous encounter with a figure claiming to be Satan who teaches you to squeeze extra funding out of your sponsor. Whether that is a simulation or a Paradox metaphor is left as an exercise for the player. The community verdict, consistent across multiple sources, is that Space Race sits near the top of the Surviving Mars DLC priority list alongside Green Planet, specifically because it adds systemic replay pressure rather than purely cosmetic content. The Colony Design Set's 25 buildings make that bundle version a clearly better purchase than the base Space Race DLC alone, assuming you care about dome layout options and sponsor-specific vehicles. The Marsvision radio is cosmetic seasoning and nobody sensible is buying the bundle for that. One legitimate criticism worth flagging: this content requires a fresh campaign to activate, so there is no retrofitting it into an existing save. Block out the time before you commit.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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