Preview: Mars: War Logs Shows A Lot Of Potential

I had the opportunity recently to go hands on with Mars: War Logs, just one of a few of Focus Home Interactive’s upcoming titles to be released during 2013. A cyberpunk RPG set on the planet Mars… must be interesting right?

Mars: War Logs has us going to… well obviously Mars as the game is set a century after the catastrophe that threw the planet and its colonies into chaos, now water has become the most precious resource left and the few companies that distribute the liquid are in a constant war to prove who’s on top of the whole business. One of them being Abundance who's struggling to maintain  its influence in front of Aurora, a young guild who's known for its Techromancer abilities. You play as Roy Temperance, a Clint Eastwood lookalike and multi talented renegade who can also make use of the Techromance arts as mentioned earlier.

Clint Eastwood in his younger days.

One thing that was highlighted during the demo was how conversations between you and other characters in the world decide what way the story would be going. When speaking to another character, you’re given a few options on how you want to reply back to them, something that was pushed quite a lot in the Mass Effect series.

When coming up against enemies, you’re given a few choices in terms of how you want to undertake your plan of attack. You can do melee or ranged attacks, use stealth to get the jump on the enemy or make use of your Techromancer, so to make a long story short, you have a lot more flexibility when it’s time to lay the beat down in a way which lets you pick a course of action depending on the situation you’re in. The whole parry and dodge aspects felt very similar to the Batman Arkham series of games except here the animation looked a lot more rigid.

During combat, you have the ability to parry and dodge enemy attacks as a standard however don’t think you can just constantly mash the attack button as the AI can do the exact same thing back to you, therefore adding a sense of challenge and generally keeping things balanced. The Techromancer abilities as I’ve mentioned earlier do come in handy as you have access to powers such as lightning or forcing your opponent back with an energy wave however to keep things fair, once an ability is used, you have to wait a certain amount of time before its available for use again. Once you’ve defeated everyone in sight, you earn experience points to use on the Skills Tree I mentioned earlier, this is split up into three main parts; Combat, Techromancer and Renegade so you can focus specifically on one area depending on your preferences.



Overall I felt that Mars: War Logs had a lot to offer and since its narrative can change depending on your conversations, it’ll be interesting to see the different outcomes that can be produced by that. From the little I’ve seen I can’t give a full thumbs up or down, instead I’ll hold my judgement till I get the full experience and hopefully some of the animation and mechanics will be a lot tighter in the final version.

Mars: War Logs is scheduled to be released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC via digital downloads during 2013. For more info on the game, check out their website - http://www.spiders-games.com/games/mars-war-logs