Mars Odyssey (PS4)
Mars Odyssey feels like a virtual museum exhibit, but not a well-designed one. Mars Odyssey involves spending a surprisingly short amount of time on Mars by way of PSVR or, should you want it to offer even less, normal play with a PS4 controller. While I long ago condemned a different awful PlayStation VR Mars game, Unearthing Mars, and said it might have been improved by leaning into a simulator angle, Mars Odyssey feels like it wants you to call it a simulator while offering even less of a simulation than a fictional game with aliens.
One of the immediate issues with Mars Odyssey is what you actually find yourself doing in this game. Your ridiculously short time spent with this game will involve you traveling to different spots on Mars where real world landers and rovers like the Curiosity and Viking 2 still sit in this game’s imagined version of the future. For the most part, your interaction with these is incredibly basic. You might hammer pieces back into place on one machine while blowing the dust off the solar panels with another, and besides the very basic sense of satisfaction in seeing something so easily fixed, this will be the limit of how you engage with them. There is a small section where you remote control a tiny Pathfinder vehicle that controls poorly, but this can lean into realism since the controls are realistic despite not being entertaining. However, none of these tasks are very hard or immersive, and what’s worse, the educational side of this game is your reward but it is presented in an incredibly dry and ineffective manner.
Once you’ve repaired a lander or rover, you can then highlight pieces of it to see a large textbox filled with technical jargon and numbers. Rather than trying to present the information in interesting or memorable ways, it feels like you’re given an explanation you’d find in an operating manual that makes it quite unlikely you’ll retain what is nominally this game’s entire purpose. Learning about these old Mars missions is pretty much the only thing you can do beyond basic interactions and unfortunately it is not composed well to really excite the player or pique any sort of fascination. Numerical facts, especially without context, are already quite dry and hard to commit to memory, hence why some common fun facts like the size of a blue whale’s heart usually appends the mention of size or weight with an immediate comparison to a more common object like a car or piano afterwards. Mars Odyssey expects you to care about the amount of pixels the rover cameras display images in and don’t even show some of the more interesting mentioned functions in action like their diamond-tipped diggers. The machines are mostly sitting still in sometimes generic stretches of Martian earth, the museum comparison again feeling apt since there isn’t much to your brief learning experience with each object.
There is one point where Mars Odyssey actually presents some information quite well early on, when you’re viewing a scale model of the solar system, but even this little praise has a caveat. Using holographic images it actually tries to establish a sense of scale for how something like Olympus Mons is much larger than Mount Everest, although it doesn’t line up the two mountains too well side by side. Instead, it is the Valles Marineris, the biggest canyon in our solar system, that instead wins out. Depicted with that Everest model nestled in it, it shows the incredible scope of the canyon, but the AI narrator saying that the Grand Canyon would only be as large as a postage stamp when compared to the holographic canyon before you is a truly effective comparison and sadly one that cannot be transitioned outside of the game’s context as a fun fact.
One of the most disappointing things about Mars Odyssey though is even with its poor choice in presentation, it wraps up extremely quickly. This is certainly no odyssey, the game’s page on Steam at least warning about its estimated 20 minute runtime despite the game having a physical PS4 release, but it still feels like it wraps up suddenly and without much having been done or said. The end even talks of a sudden issue that needs addressing and yet that’s more a reason for your AI tour guide to leave you behind, your only option now being to hop back to previous rovers if you want to review the same information that likely failed to stick with you because of its plain presentation. I knew going in the game wouldn’t be very long but I was still gobsmacked how insubstantial it all felt, like this game’s contents had been submitted to a pitch meeting as a prototype, approved, and yet nothing was added to it after. It feels almost pointless to mention aspects like how the game uses the common VR movement style of teleporting to where you point since you’re just moving around idle machines most of the time to do something like weld them without much thought. A truly shallow and hollow experience even for someone interested in space, you would really be better off with a children’s book like “Cars on Mars: Roving the Red Planet” by Alexandra Siy. While not a thick book, it does mix technical terms with better explanations, has a wider range of visuals representing the planet and rovers, and feels much more like it provides what it claims to offer than this empty VR game.
THE VERDICT: Spend some time reading Wikipedia articles about Mars rovers and you’ve had a more fulfilling and digestible experience than Mars Odyssey. Mostly mindless tasks and lifeless text boxes full of technical specifications means Mars Odyssey offers neither immersive activities or interesting information you’ll carry with you afterwards, it feeling like a weak virtual museum exhibit that didn’t really care about how engaged its viewers are. There are so many better ways to get the information the game presents and so many educational or simulator games that actually put in some work to be more interesting, robust, and interactive, so I will not prop up such a weak effort that likely hoped it could use its text boxes of bland educational information to slip by being taken to task for its hollow offerings.
And so, I give Mars Odyssey for PlayStation 4…
A TERRIBLE rating. If you are wondering why Mars Odyssey didn’t achieve my worst rating, consider it a condemnation of the game that it didn’t offer enough to even reach that low. If a person were to paint a shaky red triangle on a canvas and ask your thoughts about it, you can only get so worked up over something so simple and lacking, and Mars Odyssey doesn’t bring enough to the table for it to be truly reprehensible. While it definitely should have presented its information in more interesting ways and given the player more to do, it also reminds me of educational websites from the early 2000s where you could click through a set of images and see little boxes of text explaining what you saw. Those were low commitment, free, and more a novelty as web designers tried to dress up their information a touch for younger viewers, but even then they were still not exactly the best way to learn for those with a passion for the subject being read. Even if viewed in some vacuum, as if a kid only had a PSVR to learn about Mars with, the game still does a very weak job of it, so unless that burning passion for learning about space is satisfied with insubstantial video game models of rovers you can stand around and learn about four or five parts on each of them, they will still likely find it wanting. In fact, NASA’s website has a kids section explaining Mars, its various rovers and missions, and does so cleaner, with better visualization, and even some humor. Even an adult could undoubtedly learn better from it than Mars Odyssey, and unless you really want to smack some machines with a hammer (but only to fix them) the interactivity in Mars Odyssey doesn’t exactly give it the push it needs to beat out more traditional means of learning about a subject matter it doesn’t even present the best.
Mars Odyssey feels like it could be something you do at a museum, put on a VR headset for a bit and experience this shallow game that nominally tries to teach you. However, the museum games I do recall playing were often better designed for interactivity and if VR does become a more common part of museum exhibits, it still feels like it would do more to be engaging. It is technically a step above a passionless placard that just lays out relevant data and numbers, but learning can be an exciting and entertaining process and you shouldn’t have to settle for a game that makes no effort to supplement it. Mars Odyssey isn’t so bad it deserves infamy because again it is too insubstantial for that, but whether its the NASA website, Alexandra Siy’s book, or Wikipedia, your passion for Mars can be better explored elsewhere.