If you have ever wondered what would happen if the aliens from Mars Attacks decided to stop invading Earth and instead open a human-themed tourist attraction, Mars Attracts has a pretty good answer.
The premise is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. You play as a Martian running the first human-themed tourist attraction on Mars, which means your job is to capture humans, put them into enclosures and keep the Martian guests entertained. It is essentially a zoo and theme park management game where the animals are humans, and the people running the place are the aliens who abducted them.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going in, but the idea immediately caught my attention. There is something inherently funny about taking the premise of Mars Attacks and turning it into a management simulator. Instead of trying to survive the invasion, you are the one organizing it.
The game starts you out with a tutorial area in the Martian countryside, where you are tasked with building your first human enclosure. The first exhibit is themed around Ancient Rome, which immediately made me wonder just how far the game takes the idea. If you can abduct humans from different periods of history and build attractions around them, there is a lot of potential here.
Getting the first enclosure up and running is fairly straightforward. You build the habitat, add doors and windows, create paths for guests and make sure the humans have the basic things they need. You also have to set up utilities, including water, and eventually hire Martian employees to keep everything running.
Then comes the important part: getting some humans.
You send out an abduction expedition, wait for it to return, and eventually watch your new attractions get beamed down into their enclosure. The game treats this like a completely normal part of running a zoo. These people are now your responsibility, so you have to keep track of their needs, happiness and general condition while simultaneously making sure your Martian guests are having a good time.
Watching the first humans get dropped into the enclosure was probably the moment where the premise really clicked for me. They immediately start wandering around, eating and trying to figure out what is happening, while the Martians stand around watching them like animals at a zoo.
It is absurd, but that is clearly the point.
The game has a surprising amount of detail packed into the management side of things. Your humans need food and water, and you have to build facilities to keep them happy. You can give them toilets, showers, beds and even hamster wheels. You also have to provide decorations and other things that make the enclosure more comfortable.
At the same time, you are building the infrastructure required to keep the park functioning. Water has to be connected through pipes, buildings need electricity, employees have to be assigned to different jobs, and you need storage facilities for your supplies.
The utility system in particular is something I could see becoming much more important as the game gets larger. I was able to get everything working during the tutorial, but I was already thinking about how much easier the whole process would have been if I had planned my layout before building everything. Pipes and power lines can become surprisingly complicated once you start adding more facilities.
I am not exactly a master city planner, so my first park was pretty ugly.
Fortunately, the Martians didn’t seem to care.
Once the basic infrastructure is in place, you can open the park and start bringing in guests. You earn donations from happy visitors, hire security guards and eventually unlock rides and other attractions.
This is where Mars Attracts starts feeling more like a traditional theme park management game. You have to worry about guest happiness, cleanliness, amenities, security and the general appearance of your park. You can build food and drink stands, interactive maps, benches, trash cans and other facilities to make the experience better for your visitors.
Of course, the main attraction is still the humans.
And the game does not exactly treat them with much dignity.
One of the more ridiculous mechanics is the ability to run experiments on the humans in your enclosures. These experiments earn you additional donations and help you learn more about the humans, which can apparently help with future abductions.
The experiments range from relatively harmless durability testing to considerably more disturbing options like dismemberment.
Naturally, I had to see what happened.
The Martians grab one of the humans, haul them into the experiment and proceed to tear them apart while the audience watches. At one point, a human somehow ended up with three arms before the game promptly put everything back together.
It is cartoonishly violent rather than genuinely disturbing, and the whole thing fits the ridiculous tone of the game. The Martian guests cheer while the humans are subjected to increasingly bizarre experiments, which makes the whole situation feel more like a twisted amusement park attraction than anything resembling a serious simulation.
That sense of humor is probably one of Mars Attracts’ biggest strengths.
The game doesn’t seem particularly interested in taking itself seriously. Even the Martian employees have these bizarre names that all sound vaguely similar, making it almost impossible to remember who anyone is. You can hire scientists, porters, security guards and janitors, and each one has their own job to perform around the park.
There are also more advanced management mechanics hiding underneath the tutorial. Employees have different characteristics, scientists have likes and dislikes, and you start receiving timed objectives that ask you to accomplish specific tasks. In one case, I had to keep a scientist happy, have him witness multiple experiments and make sure none of the humans escaped.
That gave me a glimpse of how the game could become much more involved once you move beyond the introductory area.
And there are plenty of other things to unlock.
Rides start appearing as you progress, including one called Skull Mountain, along with additional facilities, research and more ways to entertain your guests. You can expand the enclosures and continue adding humans, which means the relatively simple first exhibit can eventually turn into a much larger park.
There is also something funny about watching the park slowly come together. My first attempt at designing the place was not exactly impressive. I had benches and toilets sitting around the entrance, paths going wherever I needed them to go and utilities squeezed into whatever empty space I could find.
The Martians seemed happy enough, though.
By the end of the tutorial, I had a functioning human zoo, employees running around, rides being built, guests walking around and humans being subjected to scientific experiments for the entertainment of the crowd.
Not exactly what I expected when I started playing.
Mars Attracts is essentially a park management simulator built around one very specific joke, but the joke works because there appears to be an actual management game underneath it. You are not simply watching a collection of Mars Attacks references play out. You are managing employees, resources, utilities, guest happiness, attractions and the needs of the humans you have captured.
That gives the game enough substance to potentially stand on its own.
I only played through the tutorial, so there is obviously a lot I haven’t seen yet. I have no idea how complicated the later management systems become or how much variety there is in the human exhibits and attractions. But even in the opening section, I could see how someone could get completely absorbed in trying to build the perfect Martian theme park.
And if you are already a fan of Mars Attacks, the premise makes the whole thing even more appealing.
Mars Attracts is not trying to reinvent the park management genre. Instead, it takes a familiar concept and gives it a weird enough twist to make it stand out. You are building a theme park, managing employees, keeping guests happy and expanding your attractions, except the stars of the show are humans who have been abducted from Earth.
It is funny, surprisingly detailed and just strange enough to keep me interested.
I went into this expecting a goofy little licensed-style game built around the Mars Attacks concept, but there is actually a decent park management game underneath all of the alien humor. I can only imagine how much more complicated it gets once you move beyond the tutorial and start building a much larger attraction.
If you like management games, especially ones that don’t take themselves too seriously, Mars Attracts is worth checking out. And if you already love Mars Attacks, the whole idea is pretty hard to resist.
Just remember to keep the humans happy.
Or don’t.
Apparently the Martians don’t really care.