Mars: War Logs Review
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That said, it should be kept in mind that, while I praised some aspects of the quest design, the game is still chock-full of tasks such as fetch quests and clearing areas of enemies, and that even the best quests are still hardly memorable. At its best, quest design feels closer to a smaller, less ambitious Gothic title, rather than, say, Fallout 2 or Arcanum.Speaking of comparisons, Mars: War Logs' simple morality system strongly reminded me of the Light Side/Dark Side gauge in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the original implementation of Karma in the first Fallout title (the manual even calls it Karma instead of Reputation). Stripped down to its basics, you are awarded positive Reputation when you do good deeds, and negative Reputation when you do bad deeds, though exactly how much Reputation you gain or lose, or even if you gain or lose Reputation at all isn't shown in the interface. The only indicator is your total Reputation in the character sheet.
All things considered, there are far more opportunities to be a bad guy than a good guy, given that every time you defeat an enemy you're given the option to kill them by extracting their serum (water essentially) with a syringe. Serum is both the game's currency and also a crafting ingredient necessary to craft injections, so this is theoretically rather practical, but there is already more than enough serum lying around to make this option mostly flavour. Besides, when experimenting with the game's Reputation system, getting to the "Bad" Reputation level took me a lot of time and killing, and doing a single quest was enough to go back to "Neutral".
Music and art
In terms of atmosphere Mars: War Logs is well done, especially considering its obvious low budget. The soundtrack combines some electronic themes with some very low-key ambient, and is never intrusive, but rather subtly influences and enhances the mood. The voice acting, however, is downright awful, and I suggest everyone who wishes to play the game to just read the subtitles and skip the dialogue. Art-wise the game presents a fairly industrial utilitarian vision of sci-fi that sometimes borders on post-apocalyptic, with a few minor cyberpunk influences such as the technomancers' character designs. Both understandably and unfortunately, the developers had to reuse a lot of the same assets over and over, throughout the entirety of the game, leading to some visual fatigue by the end of the game.
It doesn't help that SPIDERS' artists also used very similar lighting/palettes for most of the areas, a sort of brown-red filter that might well convey the popular image of Mars, but grows incredibly tiresome a few hours into the game. At least for the interior/underground areas, a splash of colors, or even a bit of grey here and there would have helped a lot. By the end of the game the tune changes a bit, with the last big hub featuring a bit more green and the final area having a more polished, high-tech feel, but it's too little, too late.
In purely technical terms, it has to be said that the game is not exactly a stunner and looks a bit dated, but it'd also be hard for me to call it outright ugly.
