We underappreciate roads. When you think about it, the concept of a flat, paved lane for travel might just be the single most important human invention in history. Irrigation and electricity are all well and good, but roads have made travel and communication trivial. Cities Skylines 2 gets it. You’re placing and using roads all the time, and making them work right keeps an entire metropolis going. It’s no small task, but nothing beats watching a smooth traffic flow. If you want to build roads in a new game then, the latest Mars First Logistics update is absolutely for you.
If you’ve never played it, Mars First Logistics is a physics-based building game on the titular red planet. You need to design a rover, ferry parts across the procedurally generated crimson sands, and help kickstart civilization. It’s like Cities Skylines without all the people, or Death Stranding if everything was based on delightfully wonky physics.
You’ve got complete freedom to build the rover of your dreams, and you’re going to need it. Your cargo comes in vastly different forms, with bouncy, heavy, and even floaty parcels requiring a soft touch in the editing bay. Best of all, you can play Mars First Logistics in co-op.
With the new Roads and Trains update, developer Shape Shop has added an entirely new structure-building system to Mars First Logistics. Your cute little rover now has a theodolite (that’s the camera you often see engineers using on building sites) it can use to build roads, monorails, power lines, and pipe infrastructure – you know, all the things modern society is built upon.
Finally putting roads and transport between your worksites will make the job of colonizing Mars a lot easier. Plus, if you’ve ever had the joy of building slot car tracks and racing around them, this is just like that.
You can build structures wherever you like, but if you play better with some, well, structure, Mars First Logistics has you covered. You’re given a boatload of new contracts to work through, and these will be tasks like connecting a water pipe between a reservoir and habitat, or roads between other buildings.
There are also new parcels to deliver, clouds on Mars, and some general bug fixes, too. Nothing quite matches building infrastructure and watching it tick away, and Mars First Logistics gets it.
Mars First Logistics is still in Steam Early Access, but the fourth update, Roads and Trains, is available free right now. You can find the game here.
If you’re looking for more there are plenty of incredible co-op games to try with friends right now, and some of the best indie games on PC you need to check out too.
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