My Time at Portia vs Surviving Mars
My Time at Portia
My Time at Portia is a charming fantasy-themed adventure RPG that is set on a gorgeous, revitalized world after a post-apocalyptic event wiped out the previous technologically-advanced civilization. In this game, you play as an up-and-coming Builder, a respected role in society, whose sole purpose is to help solve the town's problems by engineering a solution.With a gameplay which may fondly remind you of games like Harvest Moon, My Time at Portia may be grindy in an RPG sort of way (think repeated dungeon runs or resource-harvesting), but the game has a nice relaxing pace, where its quests (both main and side quests) are slowly revealed as you progress. Being a Builder, you can also complete a commission request daily to collect some cash. The game also features an elaborate gifting/relationship-building system, fun ruin-diving areas, tons of interesting characters to meet, and challenging dungeons. You can even romance and eventually marry an NPC (not all though) you like!
The best part of the game is definitely its in-depth crafting system. There are tons of machines you can build to help you generate a wide variety of materials to build other stuff. You can also unlock new machine technologies via the Research Center.
My Time at Portia feels a lot like an adorable MMORPG minus the MMO part. It has the grind, the dungeon runs... but of course, this game places a lot more emphasis on its resource-collecting, as well as crafting and building aspects. Sounds like a game you'd like to play? Well, despite still being in early access, the first chapter of the game is already ready and bugs-free, so if you do buy the game, know that you can at least get a good 40 hours or so out of it.
Surviving Mars
Surviving Mars is a colony-building game that's set on the red planet published by Paradox Interactive. In this game, you are in charge of the human colonization of Mars project. Aside from extracting various minerals and resources with your army of hardy drones, you'll need to set up a sustainable system of oxygen and water before bringing in the colonists to help with some of the work that drones simply aren't able to do on their own.Despite the obvious flaws in parts of its game mechanics which force players to micromanage almost everything to the point of being a hassle, Surviving Mars has a pretty nice concept and depth, as well as an even nicer style of graphics. The game could use a bit of work, that's for sure, but if they do the changes right, this might just turn into a formidable Mars colony-building simulation - a game that might just help us envision a future where whatever you've built is actually a reality.