Space exploration has long been at the forefront of plots in both films and games. Taking one giant step for man will never not evoke feelings of wonder. Sadly, that’s a feeling which doesn’t hold out for long in JCB Pioneer: Mars.
The ultimate goal of the game is to upgrade and expand your base, adding in new features like a water collector to ensure your continued survival and a Hydroponics Lab to grow your own food. You can then upgrade your space suit to enable you to carry more resources out and about with you, so this is a game about constantly improving your capabilities of longer periods of exploration.
Gameplay is a case of driving your machine to one point, before collecting an item or doing some drilling and then heading off somewhere else. All the while you’ll be upgrading your attributes, from your skills with architecture and computing to food and agriculture and engineering.
You can get out of your JCB vehicles and walk around to perform tasks like fixing equipment and entering rooms in your base, though the vehicles are imperative for long distance travel – and there’s a lot of that going on as you travel between the objective points. The travel itself can feel a little jittery – environments can take too long to render, and bits of the scenery can just pop into existence and can be a bit jarring as a result.
For sure, it’s an entertaining thought to travel through untraversed lands in a JCB, no matter the obvious product placement that’s at play. But the pace of the game just feels incredibly slow; even so for space. In the game’s sandbox environment, the biggest threats to your safety are posed by small areas of dangerous gas, and it’s not the alien battlefield that you might expect from a game in such a setting.
You can’t fault the size of the Mars that you get to explore here – it’s expansive, and viewing the map just hammers that home. But the issue – and of course it’s the limitations of the source material which pretty much dictate this – is that all the terrain is so similar. But for some underground lava type environments, it’s pretty much all orange dirt and rocks which your JCB may or may not be able to scale.
JBC Pioneer: Mars is for players who have patience and commitment. Its slow pacing is certainly not going to be for everyone, and the end goal isn’t quite on a grand enough scale in order to prompt those who are wary to persist. But the feeling of space exploration is done pretty well – the focus is pushed towards realism rather than excitement, and that’s the main reason that it feels to plod along so much.
There are certainly more memorable experiences out there.
JCB Pioneer: Mars £19.99
Summary
JCB Pioneer: Mars is slow-paced and won’t be for everyone. There’s a lack of real excitement – this is more about the long game as you build up a base – very, very slowly.