Terraforming Mars 4+

Workable to Clunky

Come on now… A slew of new improvements for this release advertised in App Store convinced me it’s time to reinstall, only to finally update and find it less stable than my 6+ month outdated version. I play this regularly on the solo challenge, and this update downgraded an already just okay user interface. Please test your application before releasing updates. That multiplayer bug you list “fixed issue where first player in X map freezes” about says it all. That’s a pretty absurd error. I’m stuck on a solo, where it won’t let me place a greenery and is flat stuck. Can’t click anywhere. Never happened before in my 2-3 dozen games. Yikes, man…. Love this board game, enjoyed the app enough to play before, disappointed to the point of actually getting my lazy self to type out a review.

Edit/Update: downgrading to 1 star, do not buy if you plan to play solo with current release. Just froze and failed on a different game, different map, different tile placement and cannot move past error. The game worked well enough prior to update but is now failing 1/3 matches. Not playing going forward until update - very poorly QA folks.

Good implementation needs a few things

First my brother and I have both played their actual board game so it was fairly easy for us to learn the digital version. As much as we loved it we couldn’t help but mention how difficult it’d be to learn the game because there were multiple things we had to search for in the Ui. However we were able to do everything we expected to through the game, it is a great digital version as it’s not lacking in any features we could find. My largest complaint is that it has no notification system so it is really only worthwhile to play if both players are going to play live. The online component gives the option to put time limits on turns but that doesn’t work great because you have to constantly go back into the game to check if it’s your turn. Even that wouldn’t be awful but it takes a good 15-30s to resume your game if you leave the app for ANY reason, even a switch to a respond or view a text message you have to sign back in and wait to reconnect. The game needs to implement notifications or have a way to see from the main menu whose turn it is. The only other flaw of the game is there is no undo, if you play a card or an action there is no way to back out of it even if it is still your turn. If those two issues were resolved it’d be a 5 star game

Developer Response ,

Hello,

We've taken a note of your detailed review. We thank you for your feedback.

Best regards,

Asmodee Digital Support

A lesson in how to frustrate users

In order to add a friend you have to go through the chat tool. Not intuitive at all but whatever, I can deal with that. The really bonkers part is that your friend needs to be online in the app AT THE SAME TIME YOU ARE SEARCHING FOR THEM in order for you to be able to find them in the user list. Wuh?

Notifications do not work at all...at least not for me on iOS. Cross platform, yay! Oh wait, it doesn’t matter if you don’t get alerted it’s your turn. I’ve tried turning off notifications and then turning them back on, power cycling my phone multiple times, I even uninstalled the app and reinstalled. Nothing helped.

You get disconnected if you let your screen go to sleep for an instant or if you jump over to another app (even for only a second or two). Then you must reconnect and load your game again which takes FOREVER. I’ve played other ports where you get disconnected easily (CoB and the true TM, Terra Mystica) but with those you could jump to another app and back into the game after a few seconds and not have to restart.

I wish I could review the gameplay but it’s been very difficult to even make it halfway through an online game. Played a few local games against the AI. The gameplay seems solid but even the expert AI is pretty bad (not unexpected for a game like this). So playing local games against AI gets stale quickly.

In general, the app has promise but it is almost unusable for online games in its current state.

Developer Response ,

Hello,

Many thanks for your detailed feedback.
We're truly sorry about the issues you encountered with our app.
Please note that, in order to provide us with further feedback, you can contact our Support team here: https://asmodee.helpshift.com/a/terraforming-mars/?contact=1

Best regards,

Asmodee Digital Support