Unearthing Mars (PS4)

Mars. Earth’s dusty red celestial neighbor has captivated mankind for ages now, and ever since we took one small step onto the moon, we’ve been looking forward to the giant leap to that red planet. Naturally, fiction has taken us there plenty of times, but to really try and capture the feeling of another world requires more immersive technology, and virtual reality could have been a way to get a small taste of what it could be like to finally land on Mars. Unfortunately, thanks to Unearthing Mars, the red planet has never seemed more unappealing.

Unearthing Mars is a sloppy VR experience that can’t seem to decide if it’s trying to be a plausible simulation or full-on sci-fi game, meaning that the excuses that could have maybe helped them get away with boring design in one area are thrown out the door as they try to pursue something more interesting in another and end up falling flat on their face. Almost nothing works like how you’d hope in Unearthing Mars. Naturally, the first thing you’d want to do on a planet other than Earth is hop around or even at least walk around a little, but the game can’t seem to figure out how to move humans around open space, so instead you need to angle your PlayStation Move controllers like you’re lobbing your character from preapproved spot to preapproved spot. Already this is a very awkward solution for movement in a VR game, but the fact this game seems to be banking on the novelty of being on Mars makes it all the more egregious that you’ll never be allowed to take a single true footstep on it.

Things get off to a horrendous start. There are only ten short levels in the game and the first one is pretty much staring at a map of Mars that is awkward to move around with your hands as characters spout dry technobabble at you. This certainly gives the impression at first that they are attempting a realistic take on the mission to Mars, so if you can slot yourself into that mindset, it’s a bit easier to swallow this boring buildup. However, when you and your partner take off to head to the red planet, suddenly the idea that this is a sim crumbles as the controls to the ship are basically as important as the levers and buttons on a child’s toy. You are free to mess with anything as you please while the characters slowly go through launch, the dials and screens not truly performing their functions at all until the specific moment you are instructed on exactly what to do and it flashes a bright color to tell you it’s time to have things in the right position.  Since they do nothing before then, fiddling with buttons and levers isn’t all that interesting, and even if you do fail to perform the only action you need to in time, you’re allowed so many errors before the mission restarts that there’s only really a need to activate one or two and then you can sit back and nap a little. Even when it looks like there might be a crash landing and the game tries to make things more tense, you’re still slowly reaching around the cockpit to flip a switch or pull a lever. The visuals on the potential crash are pretty much just a dusty windshield as well so the tension is only in your co-pilot’s tone and a few alarm sounds.

Being on Mars certainly doesn’t live up to the hype. Sure, in reality, the planet is likely just a red bumpy rock, but at least it doesn’t have ugly textures and the far off mountains don’t look like matte paintings. After lobbing your body around some preapproved spots and picking dialogue options that aren’t all that different from each other, you will eventually get to move a rover around Mars, and oddly enough, it can freely move wherever it pleases. Even strange, you can teleport your viewpoint to be right behind it, so there is a way to technically stand anywhere you like, it just only works in these rover sections where your goal is to just drive the car around a barren landscape and hope it doesn’t flip. Besides a dip or hill that can lead to a jump or a crash, you’re really just moving from spot to spot with more freedom here until you reach the next narrative setting where you’ll be locked into preapproved spots again as your astronaut character.

The Mars exploration makes up the first half of the game and its abysmally slow and has nothing of interest to do, not even allowing you to jump or get some sort of thrill from being on the Martian surface, but then the game maybe realized it wasn’t doing anything interesting so it cranks up the dials on some science fiction elements. I would perhaps consider keeping some of the details of this hidden for the sake of avoiding spoilers, but the game’s cover art shows some of it and the game’s description on all storefronts mention it too so while I will avoid the narrative explanations of it all, the alien parts of the game deserve some mention since this is where any simulation elements are abandoned in favor of incredibly poor executions of gameplay styles like shooting and puzzle-solving.

Even when you first start seeing the alien side of Mars, things aren’t as interesting as you’d hope. The pyramid structures are typical Ancient Aliens concepts and War of the Worlds gets its walker designs aped pretty hard, but at least the game does cook up a cute alien creature in the form of little dinosaur babies who were almost alright until they started doing the Floss dance and their arms completely pass through their stomachs as a stark visual disruption to what is meant to be an immersive experience. The alien segments do carry over some of the problems like pitching your character around to navigate, but when it does try to add in its new ideas, they really can’t redeem the game from its slow and boring design.

The puzzle segment is laughably straightforward. Most take the form of trying to fit pieces into objects, and while you could spend time trying to identify where a piece goes based on its shape or symbols on it… you could just grab one, hover it in front of the spots it could go in, and the area will glow green when you’ve got the right piece. There’s no need to think at all during these braindead puzzles, and even if you did try and use the clues instead as a matter of pride, it’s still not much of a step up from a jigsaw puzzle with at most 20 pieces to worry about. There isn’t even a need to be spatially aware during them, since if you cram the puzzle object into the right spot, it will orient itself properly before locking in. It’s busywork just like the lever pulling and button pressing from the landing craft, but at least it disguised itself marginally better.

The final gameplay shift is the shooting section, a portion of the game where you really just point and shoot without any thought to it. Health is so incredibly abundant here that you don’t need to worry about taking damage, the small enemies you shoot go down too easily, and the big enemies take so long to blast that all you can do is sit there and keep firing. You can charge your guns to make them stronger but it’s not really a tactic so much as just something to do besides rapidly fire at your targets. There’s no need to be accurate since most enemies either stay pretty still or don’t need to be shot before they fly away, and there are no major weak points or considerations to make when firing at the sturdier foes. You just keep doing it until it’s done and then a new big guy walks onto screen to keep the boring cycle going. Even when it tries to appeal to the fantasy of Mars rather then any potential realities of it, Unearthing Mars fails at the basics of game design.

THE VERDICT: Unearthing Mars is the perfect VR failure. If viewed as a simulation of landing on the red planet, it limits the player far too much, with even the mundane tasks someone might want for realism simplified to a laughable extent. The controls for your lander are barely a step up from a child’s toy, movement is incredibly awkward and doesn’t even give you the small joy of exploring Mars’s surface on your own two feet, and after enduring tons of dry science talk under the guise this game is going for realism, Unearthing Mars awkwardly lurches into science fiction, where its gameplay is mindless and just as slow. Puzzles you barely qualify as solving and shooting that makes a dartboard seem more exciting and complex really undermine its jump into full-on fiction, and since neither interpretation of Mars has any enjoyable substance to it, your visit to the red planet will end up dryer than the planet’s dusty surface.

And so, I give Unearthing Mars for PlayStation 4…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Unearthing Mars didn’t need to be much to tick the boxes for delivering on that simple of idea of letting you vicariously experience landing on Mars, but it can’t even get that right. Exploring the planet’s wide empty surface might have been boring if realism was the full aim, but at least being able to do so freely would let you feel like an astronaut rather than a mannequin that can spin in place awkwardly and be moved from spot to spot without taking a single footstep itself. There are virtual museum tours with more immersive movement and exploration even without the VR angle, but Unearthing Mars is only confident in letting you explore with a vehicle that doesn’t have much to do besides getting you across the barren wastes by awkwardly teleporting to it and then watching it drive off before you teleport to it again. If this had been slow buildup to interesting alien segments than maybe it could have been excusable, but when you’re thrown into the sci-fi side of your adventure, Unearthing Mars just reveals it is incompetent all around. There is no gameplay here worth engaging with because it’s all simplified and dumbed down beyond the point it really requires the player to do much more than act exactly as instructed. The puzzles would rather you hold an object to a glowy spot than figure them out, and the shooting has no real pressure to it to make it exciting or tense.

Unearthing Mars is a black hole of VR issues, sucking them all into one awful experience. The developers couldn’t figure out how to move you when you only use a headset and Move controllers so you chuck yourself around like a rock. The VR areas need to be big to show off Mars but the developers put nothing interesting to look at in these wide barren areas, and even when they show you new things the textures are low quality. The gameplay segments focus less on the actions and more on giving you some things to finally look at, and even then they’re not impressive because your participation is so dull and straightforward that dramatic moments have no weight and pretty sights are just held back until you’ve slotted a puzzle piece into its glaringly obvious slot. Virtual Reality can be exciting and immersive when done right, even if the gameplay isn’t always up to snuff it can provide experiences that are moving just because it can simulate the sensation of being there and looking around freely, but Unearthing Mars’s few moments of impressive sights are drowned out by the failures of other visuals, the dry exposition around them, and the gameplay that has nothing going for it. Even if going to Mars in real life is as mundane as dropping by a desert on Earth, it would at least have purpose and novelty to it. Unearthing Mars is just a jumbled mess or failed ideas padded with restrictions and filler. If this is what visiting Mars is really like, we’d be better off never leaving Earth.