Rover Mechanic Simulator

Welcome to unscrewing and screwing simulator (and no, not that kind). It's one of those games which are fun exactly for the time it takes you to finish demo. The game loop is shallow and soon turns to tedious. While most simulators take an activity, remove the boring bits and let you do the fun part. RMS goes the opposite way, showing you how dull and tedious a work of a mechanic is, even on Mars.

It goes pretty much literally like this:

1) You choose a rover to repair and get some preliminary analysis (it doesn't detect metals, it has troubles going, cameras are blurry etc.) Those are supposed to point you to the problematic part.

2) You play an obligatory minigame where you guide a crane to packaged rover and then transfer it to worktable. The minigame is fun exactly once, providing no challange and taking time. You can't even bang the rover into anything, because the crane automatically pulls it up.

3) You analyze the rover parts. Which could be really interesting, because who wouldn't want to wield the various oscilloscopes, voltmeters and all those other tinkery tools I can't even name. Except the analysis is performed by right clicking on a part. You click, you get 0-100% condition reading. Wow.

4) You identify the faulty part. It's usually rather clearly hinted by the preliminary analysis and at some point you can unlock the ability to see it right away, because even the authors probably noticed looking for it is rather boring.

5) You remove the faulty part. That is, you right click it which shows you where the screws are and then you right click the screws one by one so they go "bzzzzt clink" and disappear. On the bright side, unlike when I'm actually doing this at home, you can't lose them, which is pretty great. If you're unlucky, the part can't be removed before you remove another part, in that case see point 5)

6) Some parts separate into subparts. In that case you carry it to a workbench or soldering station where you repeat previous points for subparts. To add some freshness to the cycle, if you're working on soldering station, you solder instead of screwing. I wouldn't have noticed the difference, but the "bzzzzzet clink" sound is missing.

7) You go to 3D printer, choose the faulty part and print a replacement. If you're clever, you start the printer before you go screwing. If you are not, then you now have 30-120s of free time you can spend roaming your one room workshop and admiring its emptiness. Or you can play snake on one of the workbenches. Because even the devs noticed there's nothing better to do.

8) You switch to assembly mode, which means you're going to do the disassembly in reverse order. The game shows you which part you can add at any given moment, so you don't have to worry about remembering anything. Or thinking. You just right click a missing part, then screw it in and continue till the rover is reassembled.

9) You install a remote calibration tool (guess how, a hint - it involves clicking) and play another obligatory minigame. It's like the plumber game where you construct a pipe for water to flow through, except you only have two pieces, you can freely rotate them and there's no time constraint. It's so much fun you can eventually unlock an ability that allows you to skip it.

10) Hand in the rover, get resources which you need for printing bits for the next rover. I haven't found any other purpose for them and I always came out with positive balance after repairing, so rather than "I stopped paying attention to them after first cycle" I have to say I didn't start paying attention to them at all. But you can get more resources by recycling the faulty parts. Because than... you have more resources. Wow.

And that's it. Time from time you get a skill point you can use for faster screwing or cheaper printing, which would be cool if it mattered any. During two hours of gameplay (+ tutorial) I've encountered three rover types, two of which are identical (Spirit and Opportunity). They consist of many part which might be interesting if they actually differed in any way, but they don't. They are there just to be screwed on, screwed off or replaced, whether it's a CPU, wheel, solar array or metal detector.

I had a slim hope that the game might get more fun if I got to do something more complex than "replace a wheel". Be careful what you wish for, else you may end up disassembling the whole rover so you can replace the central part of its chasis and then screw everything on again. It isn't more fun. It's maddening, because 95% of what you're doing is absolutely pointless, the only reason to mess with the parts is, that they are in the way.

During the first few rounds, the notion of working on the rovers, even if it mostly means just removing and replacing parts, is oddly satisfying. Which is what made me buy the game after finishing the demo. I was hoping for more activities, more rovers, more complex actions. Sadly, it's not the case and seeing the game is leaving early access in two days, I don't expect the final version to be any different either. So unless you're fond of right clicking, I recommend avoiding this game.

EDIT: I've checked the game after release, just in case there was something groundbreaking added. Short version - no. Long version - two new rovers. A helicopter which is rather ridiculously small, ingenuity which is rather satisfying huge. So huge it comes with a brand new table (now you have to navigate the crane to the correct table, gasp!). The table has a lift and you can move the rover up or down to access parts on top or on bottom.
Resources are still useless, the workshop is still an empty room. I wanted to try and get some complex job with Ingenuity to examine it more thoroughly, but that would mean doing at least one more repair and I was in danger of dying from boredom, so... no.

The game is good and all but the parts assembly part feels a bit slow and not very smooth like in Car Mechanic Simulator 2018. I just hope that in the future they will fix this. I want this game to feel like my money's worth.

Rover Mechanic Simulator, yet another mechanic simulator game where the player is expected to unscrew some machinery, disassemble it, find some malfunction, repair it and then assemble it again. It is looking good, it sounds good (especially music tunes on local radio), and it provides somewhat unique machinery to fix - some remotely-driven drones which are supposedly used to explore Mars.

However... the usual thing happened. The idea was good, but its execution doesn't actually cover the fun and enjoyment section.

I mean, it is working, on the basic level. Everything's good enough, for the first look. But, there are too few different machines (5, plus 1 in DLC), and there are too few details in those machines. You can try it all in one or two hours at most, and then... there is a big emptiness instead of gameplay.

The stories which are going with the 'missions', actually orders to fix yet another drone, are not intriguing enough. After a little while, most players will not bother to read those supplementary texts, because there is no that much difference between repair tasks, and those 'stories' are not adding anything. Not to 'game lore', not to understand what you need to fix. So, it's just a list of identical machines, with the only difference that in one case you need to change the generator, and some suspension and/or tires in another. And that's it! There is nothing else in the game! Unless you're a junior Linux admirer and enjoy the jokes about "sudo is not working on Mars", or looking for a built-in variant of the games from the '70s, like Pong or Snake.

What's even worse, the game developer deliberately made several elements of his game in such a way as to waste players' time. Like that crane to move drones from the receiving platform to the operating table - too many unnecessary operations to do such a simple task! Same with the elevator, same with the tables where you blowing off the sand from solar panels or 'fixing' electrical parts. There is always the same problem: it is organized to perform more operations over every detail than it's really needed for an effective repair process. It is not a problem when you do it for the first time, but when we're speaking of dozens of very similar, generic tasks, it is getting more and more annoying. What's more, when you need to observe drones from above, the observation/repairing process always turns into something very fiddly. You don't have a stool to climb higher! So you have to jump around (and there's no jump mechanic in the game) and try to 'bend' the camera so that you can see something on the upper part of the drone, which can only be raised higher but cannot be lowered lower for ease of repairing process.

Finally, the point where I dropped off the game, concerning its achievements. You see, the developer misused the idea of hidden achievements: some of those are connected to some specific missions in the game, while some other, all of sudden, cannot be unlocked until you buy the DLC with the 6th drone. But it is not marked in the game's statistics in any way! So you can play the basic game hour after hour, mission after mission, hoping to finally unlock those achievements... But you can't! Unless you pay even more money, for a possibility to 'complete' this game. Get me right: the problem is that the developer added some DLC achievements to the main game achievements list, it is bad already, but actually quite usual, and then those added DLC achievements were marked as 'hidden', making it impossible to guess how to unlock them, and especially that you need to buy the DLC to get them.

Ohm well... the overall mark is 5.9/10. The game looks decent for the first hour, but gets boring too quickly, and makes too many wrong steps to confuse the player, from the store page info to the actual game process/progress.