Farlanders is a turn-based citybuilder about terraforming Mars
As much puzzle as management
I'm a sucker for strategy games which boil their mechanics down until they almost become puzzle games, particularly if they also involve building rather than war. I'm thinking of games like Concrete Jungle, Slipways, Terra Nil and now, maybe, Farlanders.
That last game may be less familiar. Farlanders is a turn-based strategy game about terraforming Mars via building placement and adjacency bonuses, and it's due for release next month.
Here's the new release date trailer:
In Farlanders, you're aiming to do what you do in any citybuilder: keep your citizens happy. This is made harder than normal by the unforgiving Mars terrain, which you slowly colonise and terraform by building structures. Where you place those structures matters a lot, as the trailer above explains, since you'll gain efficiency bonuses for placing wind turbines alongside mountains or by stacking greenhouses together.
Farlanders' Steam page goes into further detail, with mention of campaign missions, procedurally generated maps, dynamic weather changes, a research tree, and a trading economy with other (AI) colonies where prices fluctuate based on supply and demand.
I'm even sold on the fairly basic pixel art, simply because the trailer shows newly generated resources whooshing towards stockpiles on the UI. It seems satisfying.
Farlanders has had a demo on Steam since last year, as well as a separate but narratively linked Prologue mission, but the release date is new. You'll be able to colonise the final game from January 17th, 2023.