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in App Store convinced me it’s time to reinstall, only to finally update and find it less stable than my 6+ month outdated version.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

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.

Great adaptation of the real thing

Hey devs, I hope you’re doing well and thanks for all your hard work on making my favorite board game available for my iOS devices. I’ve literally played this game hundreds of times irl and online and I would like to ask if it would be possible to let the user decide the time restraints based off of 15 min intervals. So if I wanted to set the game for 1 hour and 15 min it would be easy to do so. Also there have been plenty of games where I was just moments away from seeing the score and I timed out and I felt like 2 hours of my life were wasted. Would it be possible to allow your opponents to grant you more time when you’re going to time out? Especially in private games when I’m playing with my friends. And finally there have been public games were my opponent leaves mid game with over half an hour left on his timer. I then have to wait half an hour for his timer to run out before the AI takes over. Can you give players a 5 min window to make their move and if they don’t make it they forfeit their rounds for that generation? I also wanted you to know that I would be willing to pay extra to play with the expansions. Jonathan Gomez

Great single player, terrible multiplayer

If you are looking for a good solo mode or single player mode, this absolutely is one of the best digital adaptation. Terraforming Mars ranks amongst the top 3 in board games and the digital adaptation is just as satisfying. There can be some feature improvements like an undo button but there really isn’t much to knit pick on. Game is solid. In multiplayer mode, however, the game crashes almost every time. This is particularly frustrating especially right after you have spent 40 minutes building your engine. It either displays “you’ve been logged out” which is still reconnect-able or it’ll state “you’ve ran out of time” in which case you can no longer re log in again. I’m using an iPad Pro and my wife is using iPad Air, so I don’t feel like it’s my hardware issue. We are also dedicated gamers, so we do not shut/or switch to other apps while in game. So far we have gave the game 3 tries, and all 3 times we were logged out and unable to reconnect. Very, very frustrating, will not ever play multiplayer again online. If you are doing single player, this is great. IF you are buying for multiplayer, stick with the actual board game.

Glitches stop it from being 5

Updated: Solo Challenge score tracking/hiscores would be amazing - ie, being able to see your top scores with each corporation in solo challenge. Overall, accurate adaptation that works well on mobile. I’ve only played one game and ran into a pretty substantial glitch, though - the power infrastructure card doesn’t work at all. This is meant to convert energy into mC, but it simply doesn’t work. It uses up an action but no energy is lost and no money is created. Unfortunately, in this game even a single card not working correctly can be the difference between a win or loss (especially when I’m gaining 25 energy per turn, that could be converted to a lot of mC, and by association, VPs!). I’m sure there are others that people have mentioned as well. If these are ironed out then the game is pretty good as is. Other concerns are that there is no undo option, especially for city placements where there’s no confirmation - that’s pretty ridiculous, honestly. There is also no confirmation for playing tiles on the map, which should be an extremely easy implementation.

recent update (mar 13, 2023) broke solo games(sort of)

first off, i highly recommend the game, even if you uave no friends to play with, it has ai opponents. however, when playing solo, and the game ends and it counts up your score, the game freezes and doesn't bring you back to the main menu or ask you to save your high scores. i noticed this happeneing a couple of days ago and thought it was weird and then today, i tried restarting ipad and it still happens. i tried reinstalling the app and it still happens . .and then i looked at the version history and see they just did an update and it says "many fixes". . but then they broke stuff. also worth mentioning, when looking at your list of saved scores, the game doesn't sort them in any sort of logical order. i would expect it to sort the highest scores to the lowest, in descending order, but it doesn't, so the list is kind of meaningless. it doesn't even show the scores unless you physically click(tap) on them. athough, there does appear to be 4 buttons on the side that look like sorting filters, but when i tap them, they don't do anything, except they do seem to collapse to the right, showing more stuff, but the stuff is cut off by the side of the screen, as if it's trying to go off the screen to the right. i have had this app formyears and this has NEVER been addressed. and for an app made for mobile devices, how the heck have they let something like stuff not fitting on the screen go for so long unfixed?

Fantastic game but needs work

I have always loved playing terraforming mars in real life so finding it in the App Store was just a bonus. However some things that need to be fixed: 1. I like the animations of people’s moves and the card showing up…. However why do I loose so much time waiting on the animations to finish. If I want to watch them I shouldn’t be forced to loose time which when I first started playing didn’t even know you could turn the animations off. This lead me to be unable to finish my first 4 games that I got kicked out of while watching the animations being done. Instead the only way to play and keep up is to constantly check the card log of the other play rather than the game show you what has been played. Overall I like the concept of the timer to make games move fast but when the timer activates and stops should be fixed especially if you want to see the animations 2. The game bugs out a lot. I have had several games since the last update that I’ve had to forfeit because I couldn’t get the card screen to move or it would let me do any action and the timer would just keep ticking…. Please fix 3. Would love to see the ability to play the computer and not only when someone quits the game. Especially since when people quit the game the ai only works half the time. The other half freezes and you just have to leave the game. If these 3 things can get fixed it would be perfect. Thank you!

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