I saw this game a few years back (2 years ago?) at the Bitsummit in Kyoto, and I remember it looks very intriguing. It puts you on the planet Mars, where you have to carry stuff (hence the name logistics) across its surface. The problem it asks you to solve is “what does it take to move this object from place A to place B?”. And the whole thing is in 3D, of course, with some degree of physics simulation.

And to tackle that challenge, you get some parts to assemble a rover. Very similar to LEGO parts, by the way. Which makes me wonder why LEGO never really focused too seriously on this kind of market of construction games. They are mostly known for the lazy licensed LEGO games with famous movie franchises. A game like Mars First Logistics is exactly what LEGO, the company, should commission, if they had any idea. Anyway.

Moving an object from A to B is a simple concept, but as they say, the devil is in the details.

Carrying Stuff Around

The game starts easy with objects that have standard shapes (cube-like) and that are small, so it’s really not that much of a challenge. Then you get longer, thinner objects, that require some parts on your machine to lock the object in place, such as mechanical claws. But things don’t stop there - soon enough you get to carry very large and heavy objects, and then the challenge is not just to carry the object, but to keep your vehicle stable as you move around.

Once your center of gravity is tilted too much forward, moving around on the uneven Mars landscape will make you flip and rollover. When this happens, it’s not really game over. You can ask for a reset, that will put your vehicle back on its wheels, but the penalty is that it will return the object you were carrying back to its initial location. So, in effect, you really need to be make sure that your thing is really, really stable. Which will often make you come back to improving your design.

But reaching your destination does not mean that your mission is over. At your destination, there is a specific spot where you need to leave the object. Imagine you are carrying a box, and it needs to be put not on the ground, but on the top of a shelf. This means that your machine needs to have the capability to extend an arm, or something like that.

Sometimes you carry things like steel columns, and they need to be placed vertically! That one is super tricky, carrying things horizontally and then being able to make them pivot from a horizontal position to a vertical one is much harder than it looks.

It’s tough, but the controls are really precise and accurate, so you can only blame yourself if you mess up.

Designing your machine

This is the LEGO part of the game. Within the game you have a different screen to design your contraption, that lets you assemble parts together. The game lets you start with templates (templates are pre-existing vehicles that you can use as a base for modification) in order to speed things up, but you can also start from scratch.

The editor is extremely powerful. It gives you a huge amount of freedom on how to connect things together, letting you decide angles with a lot of flexibility. It works extremely well with a mouse - but not only. The devs have really made sure the game would work well with a gamepad too, and they succeeded in making it a breeze to edit and make your machine from a couch as well. This is not an easy task, both in terms of UI and control, and they passed with flying colors.

Your machine is not just a bunch of static parts glued together: to make your robot more useful, you add little motors here and there (for example, claws will need motors to close or release the clawing mechanism). This means controls beyond driving. The editor will also let you assign which button to use to activate which motor in a specific direction. Since this is mostly up to you, making sure the controls are practical for your use-case is part of the design job!

It’s not just like a sandbox. The construction part presents some more challenge. The typical way in constructor games is to give you limited access to resources. In Mars First Logistics this means a restrained budget. Every part you add to your machine costs money, and you are therefore constrained by a fixed limit for each quest. The second challenge is that you only have access to specific parts.

As you progress from one mission to the next, you will be given access to new parts and increased budget.

You can access all current parts through the construction menu.

Connecting dots

You are introduced to a few other gameplay elements. Your rover is basically controlled remotely, so it relies on the proximity of radio waves to be managed. Some missions will make you go very far away, and will require that you build new transmission relays along the way so that your rover can continue its operations.

In the above map you can see the path of towers building a clear line towards a specific direction that is needed to complete the quest.

Transmission towers require a line of sight, so when building them you need to ensure that there is no mountain or clear obstable on the way.

Patience needed

The first quests are easy to give you confidence, but soon enough you will see that problems will require much more thinking, planning, and a lot of trial and error. That’s fine, and the challenge is usually very fair. This is ultimately a sandbox game, where physics and contraptions help you solve specific problems.

So from the get-go, this is NOT a game for everyone. Some people call it a puzzler, but that’s giving a bad name to Mars First Logistics. This is ultimately a game that teaches you the concepts of engineering, not how to find a single, hidden solution with stupid clues along the way. A lot of trial and error means a lot of frustration along the way. You will need grit to advance in this game, and not give up easily.

Overall, for an indie title, this is a great piece of design. From the rather simplistic (cell-shaded?) graphics (that make the game very easy to read and visualize) to the excellence in UI/UX considering the amount of complexity the game packs, Mars First Logistics is a resounding success. If I were to compare it with games in the same genre as Kerbal in Space, Mars First Logistics looks like an expert where Kerbal was a rookie when it came to UI/UX design. An indie game with AAA levels of polish with the user interface.

This is as close as building LEGO machines for Mars that you are going to get.

Great idea, great execution. Love it. It’s available on Steam and works perfectly on the Steam Deck, at 60 FPS even when using very little TDP.

Naturally, it ends up inside our recommended games list.