Mars: Mars: Platform jumping adventure – Review

In Mars: Mars, The Mars Corporation, under their “Put a Human on Mars No Matter What” program have allowed astronauts and tourists to explore the planet’s surface using jetpacks. The goal is to land on the next platform over while collecting coins and enjoying the colorful landscape. You have a limited amount of fuel and tap either to the right or left of the character to use that jet.

There are plants and trees that make you bounce and “selfie” areas you can hover in to add a photo that you can save or share. For each 60 coins, a new character can be unlocked with increasing “arrival” times. You can of course wait the time out or use the premium “coins” to speed up the wait. You can also buy characters outright. There are ads labeled as “Mars Corp Announcements” and they are optional but award coins.

The graphics are bright and change depending on the character. You can romp around as a basic astronaut on a red barren world but there are a large variety of characters to unlock and each character seems to change the environment. So far I’ve unlocked a gorilla in a dark world and a hippy named Luna with a ukulele slung over her shoulder and a crazy rainbow psychedelic planet.

The sound effects are nice but I wish there had been some music of some sort. Having a spooky space theme or a chirpy ukulele rift would have set the stage better for the different characters.

Unfortunately, the difficulty of the game made it hard to unlock and explore new characters. You have a very, very small amount of fuel in your jetpack, and while there seem to be unlimited lives there are some spots that just seemed completely impossible to pass. The controls are very frustrating to learn at first. Other than the unlocking of characters, there does not seem to be any end goal and there are no levels.
For a casual quick game, Mars: Mars is cute and fun once the controls are learned. The graphics are lovely and the characters quirky and fun.