Mars: War Logs [2013 -- Spiders]

[Starfox]

First published on September 13, 2013

As the "War Logs" part of the title indicate, Mars: War Logs is meant to evolve around what one assumes would be a great and compelling story. However, the story of Mars: War Logs possesses the unfortunate characteristic to be full of cliches, beginning with the characters names. But a bit of the story first, just to set the stage.

The location is Mars, the year... we don't really know but the events of the game happen about 200 years after the first efforts of colonization of Mars. The terraforming process of the planet was interrupted 130 years before after a catastrophic event that altered the solar system in general and Mars polar axis in particular. Apparently this event also contributed to the loss of contact with Earth, at least that's what can be assumed. As one can see the circumstances leading to Mars situation as depicted in the game are quite vague. But whatever, the whole thing is about setting the stage so...

After the period following the catastrophe that is called "The Turmoil", Mars Colonists found themselves confronted to a new power, water guilds. Those water guild provide, of course, water and so are all powerful on Mars. They also decide to go to war against each others, forcibly enrolling people to wage wars.

The story begins in a prisoner convoy heading to a POW camp with a guy named "Innocence". That's about when the cliches series starts. Innocence obliterated by war, Innocence about to get raped by a big guy as he arrives in the POW camp, Innocence that is in general so hilariously... well, "innocent"... and so on. The whole story involve this kind of names "Frugality", "Chastity" (this one being a prostitute), Honesty... and on and on. The main character (the guy you'll take control of) also has a virtue name "Temperance", but he prefers to be called simply Roy. For some reasons he decides to take Innocence under his wing, first preventing him from getting raped and then embarking him in a "Big Escape" plan to flee the POW camp.

Roy is also a former "technomancer", a guy literally able to work magic with electricity. Players don't get to use that in the POW camp but the true nature of Roy is revealed during the escape and becomes quite central for the rest of the game. As a technomancer Roy is able to use electricity to disable his enemies quite effectively, to protect himself from their wrath or keep them at bay, the rest of the fights being mainly of the melee kind. There is a nailgun that allows for long range fighting but due to the scarcity of ammo and/or material to create ammo, you don't get to use it a lot and it's generally preferable to keep it to deal with enemies attacking from range. Most melee weapons (and armors) can be upgraded to add more offense/defense or some special properties.

As a game, Mars: War Logs (which eventually could have been simply called "Technomancer") is OK to play the time it lasts. However the quite basic and pale story never manages to drag it above average. The whole thing with the virtue names is obvious, the romance plots are utterly pathetic. Don't go in there expecting anything like Bioware Golden Era (yep, I'm forced to add "Golden Era" for obvious reasons). There's also the "no kill" thing going on in this game. No matter how hard you hit the bad guys, and even if you hammer them with the nail gun or grenades, they never die. The only way to actually kill them is to finish them off (Roy extracts the juice -- or serum as it is called, which represent the game currency -- from their veins) which in turn puts you on the dark path in a very obvious way. Still the whole "hey, I just nailed your head a dozen times but no hard feelings right?" routine is quite weird.

Likewise, there is a stealth mechanics in this game but even when upgraded quite a lot, one wonders what its purpose is since in the whole game there may be two or three places where one can really put it to use. I've found that stealth in general is a bad way to invest your skill points.

Mars: War Logs is also one of those games more suited to the use of a controller than a keyboard/mouse combo (even if the game does not particularly proclaim it). The long range targeting is automatic and the rest of the combat is at melee range which makes the use of a controller particularly comfortable and the necessity of having the precise control of a mouse very secondary.

In the end, Mars: War Logs feels like a game that Spiders made so they could demonstrate what they could technically do but without really too much thinking on the story part. A pity because with a story more evolved, less basically obvious and properly delivered, this could have been a nice little gem even in spite of some small gameplay flaws.