Mars 2120 Review - Middling Martian Misadventures | GameLuster (2024)

You are Sgt. Anna Charlotte. You are sent back to Mars, where you were born, to discover what has gone wrong with the Martian Colony. However, your landing isn’t a safe one, and after barely making it down in your escape pod, you have to outrun a perilous landslide. You are stuck, alone, on what remains of the Martian colony. You must find out what went wrong, and find a way to escape with your life.

This is the setup for QUByte Interactive’s Mars 2120, a 2.5D Metroidvania that mixes run and gun action with melee combat and elemental powers. It’s a fairly standard setup for the genre; the hero being isolated and alone on an alien planet or in a twisted realm has been part of the genre since its roots, after all – but Mars 2120 does try and add an element of mystery in the form of audio logs so you can try and piece together the story of Anna’s past and what happened to Mars in her absence.

Anna begins the game with a double jump, a dodge roll, a gun capable of firing in any direction, and a melee attack – which is kind of unusual for these kinds of games. And that’s not the only thing that’s unusual, as the ability to perform slide kicks and thus squeeze through tight passages is actually one of the last elemental/movement powerups you acquire in the game. Yes, you heard that right, elemental/movement. Basically every form of movement upgrade in Mars 2120 (aside from the wall jump) is tied to the lightning, ice and fire elements that the game touts. The first of these that you encounter is an electric dash that lets you cross electrified doorways, followed closely by an electric dive kick and an electric uppercut that acts as a triple jump but also allows Anna to teleport along sparking electrical wires, which is used to gain access to new plot progression and to find several of the other upgrades. This also gives you access to a fast firing, electrically imbued machine gun. The first ice upgrade gives you access to a shield that can block and reflect enemy shots and an ice elemental shotgun, and the fire upgrade give you a flamethrower and a napalm grenade that deal damage over time and attract heat seeking attacks. Also once you get your first elemental upgrade, you can’t not be in an elemental form, and several enemies are themselves immune to specific elements. Your movement options are also linked to elemental forms, so definitely get used to swapping between them. For the most part, I found the damage output of the ice shotgun was by far the better close range option over the flamethrower, with the electric machine gun being the only option for range.

Movement is for the most part pretty good, as are the movement animations. However it’s very clear that no one was satisfied with any sort of mantling animation for Anna, since whenever she nearly makes a jump onto a ledge she blinks just a little bit further to make it up there instead. There’s also the comedy of whenever Anna gets knocked back by any enemy attack she goes completely rigid for the entire length of her fall, and there are some very long vertical sections in the game. It’s a good thing there isn’t any fall damage except for the few random bottomless pits, which I just think a game like this should not have, at least during exploration. Instant kill plane during bosses, that’s acceptable, so are big damage spikes and hazard zones, but bottomless pits belong in traditional platformers. Likewise, given that stunlock is a thing and lasts as long as it does, Anna really needs some iframes against hazards, especially in lava. Getting knocked into lava is often as sure a death sentence as getting knocked into one of the bottomless pits around the map. The penalty for death may only be to respawn at the nearest checkpoint or save station, but it’s still very annoying to lose that much progress because one of the various fly enemies tackled you into a pit. Another thing I’m not fond of is the game’s love of locking off areas permanently. On several occasions the only way to traverse to a new area for the first time is by going through a sequence that destroys an intermediary area, often with a boss fight in the way. This is all well and good, but it plays hell with pathfinding to discover that, for example, a wall that fell down to lock you in a boss arena never opens back up once the boss is defeated and you cannot exit out the same way on a return trip and have to backtrack a very long way. Likewise, for the bosses who destroy their arenas, maybe throw a couple sparky wire teleport spots on either side of the destroyed arena just for traversal’s sake afterwards?

Also on the topic of exploration, Mars 2120 often gates its access to new areas with elemental gates. This is not a problem, but what’s not good is that the game has an automatic guidance system to push you towards the next checkpoint. On at least two occasions the game marked as a waypoint one of these elemental gates before I had the appropriate elemental movement upgrade, making for a very lengthy backtrack across basically the entire width of the map. On another occasion the waypoint marker pointed slightly above the door I was supposed to enter, and then once I did enter the door the waypoint didn’t actually update until I progressed much further along the corridor. Speaking of the automatic waypoint, while the game does mark out any upgrades you see but don’t collect, it doesn’t mark out suspicious walls or slide zones, and there’s no way to manually mark the spots on the map.

Let’s talk about upgrades for a moment. You have electric, which gives an uppercut, dive kick, forward dash, AOE blast, and parry; ice, which gives a shield, throwable lance, diving lance (air only), anti-air ice sword, the ground only ice pillar and freeze grenade (also ground only) that can create platforms on water; and fire, which gives a napalm grenade, sidewise fire kick, fire uppercut, falling fire axe kick, and the fire slide. All of these are used at some point to progress, usually through an elementally themed door, burn a tree root or activate an electrical system, and to find more optional powerups in random corners of the map. Each one also has a core charge function, a fire boost, extra ice armor, or to slow time for electric. These are the plot upgrades. There are also optional upgrades you can find and they activate permanently at save stations for XP, which you get off of enemies when they die and at specific spots around the map. These do things like upgrade your health, defense, melee damage, your rate of fire, shotgun range, reduce your own elemental damage, or just unlock a handy elemental upgrade like long distance sprinting for the electric form. I never felt like I was in danger of not having enough XP for these new skills, and given that enemies only drop XP or healing and enemy health drops are the only form of healing outside of save points, and I think the balance of health vs XP drops could definitely be weighted more towards HP drops.

The bosses are all lovingly designed and animated, so many of them are in gorgeous set pieces and are satisfying to fight, except for a couple of things. Some bosses, especially the early ones, felt extremely RNG dependent, especially one boss who was defeated by pushing it back far enough in the boss arena, and had a dash attack to regain ground and thus HP. The first time I fought that boss it seemed all it wanted to do was dash, and it didn’t do it at all. Similarly, a lava boss who only became vulnerable to attack after a specific attack, could go an incredibly long amount of attacks in between uses of the vulnerability exposing attack. On the other hand, some bosses were just far far too easy. One boss chases Anna, and you have to damage it as best you can while it trails behind you, I found rather accidentally that while it was incredibly difficult to fight with any of the elemental guns, it was almost instantly destroyed by the napalm grenade. I found the bosses to be much better designed and balanced the further into Mars 2120 I got, with the small exception of one moment during the final boss fight involving platforming through a narrow hole as a platform moves up and down through said hole while missiles target you through that hole. Also, while melee was always mechanically effective, (except during the final boss fight) it doesn’t feel like it has weight to it, as there is not much in the way of sound effects or special animations for wailing on a stunned boss with your uppercuts and axe kicks.

As for the story, I’m still not 100% sure what was going on and how Anna was tied to the incident that destroyed Mars. Maybe the datalogs I didn’t wind up finding hold the answer but if they were that vital, they should have been in places impossible to miss. Another thing that would have been nice to have would be responses from Anna herself, to provide context and grounding for the revelations of all these logs, especially the ones relating to her.

Beyond all this, there are tons of tiny little flaws that don’t break the game, but make it a bit futzy. For example, some environmental objects you can interact with, such as doors and the fast travel stations, don’t detecting you if you roll into their general area. And sometimes the game will not recognize inputs to move or fire for a split second if you get hit while pressing the button.

On balance, Mars 2120 isn’t bad, it just lacks a certain spark and polish to really push it over the edge. It has a lot of little flaws that add up to something serviceable, but unremarkable.

Tim reviewed Mars 2120 on PlayStation 5 with a review code.