Mars 2120 Review

Mars 2120 is a metroidvania game developed and published by the Brazilian studio and South American publisher QUByte Interactive. Released on the 1st of August, the title takes place in a research facility on the planet of Mars. Being a 2.5D metroidvania, it immediately seemed interesting to me — how do you combine a 2.5D game with metroidvania elements? Can it really be done well?

When the game starts, you have a short, simple tutorial. You learn to walk around, jump, and shoot enemies. Immediately after that, there’s a sort of earthquake, which you have to run away from. After getting through it, you reach an old research facility, and that is where most of the experience takes place. In that facility, you learn about your own story, as you were an experiment in it, about what happened to the place that caused it to be abandoned, and all the things inside it to become hostile. It’s a pretty good narrative, but I wasn’t really invested in it while playing, mostly because you get information about it so rarely, it’s easy to forget what the last thing you learnt was.

Some of the unlockable abilities in Mars 2120 are very interesting, especially given the small twist the developers put on them — each ability has a different “core”. These cores interact with the world and objects within it differently: the first one you unlock lets you interact with electricity, pass certain doors, etc. The other ones, though, let you traverse the world differently, unlocking other pathways only with that core. The rest of the gameplay elements are pretty simple: you have a melee attack, a gun, and can walk to the sides. There is some platforming in the game, but it’s fairly simple, and I don’t think I’ve ever died due to hard platforming and not because of an enemy. Speaking of dying — the experience is really not that easy, and I’d even go so far as to say that it can feel a bit unfair. The way some bosses work is very complicated, and really not explained well in my opinion. For example, at around the 1.5-hour mark, there’s a boss that does not have HP in the standard sense — they need to be physically pushed all the way to the right side of the arena. You push the enemy back by hitting it enough times, but if you wait too long, it’ll go back forward and its HP bar will go up again. I really don’t think it was communicated well to the player, or maybe I’m just way dumber than I thought, but it took me more time than I want to admit to figure that out. But even given that, I would not say that the gameplay is bad — the abilities are very interesting and the combat feels great — it’s just that figuring out how to play is almost entirely up to the player.

While Mars 2120 is mostly played from a 2D perspective, there are some 2.5D scenes, and honestly, it looks great. The art style isn’t too stylised, but also not too realistic, so the big monsters don’t feel out of place, but the player character still looks like a human being. I wouldn’t say I’d use any scene from it as a wallpaper, but it’s impossible to deny that this game is absolutely beautiful.

There is full voice acting for every dialogue piece in the game, although there aren’t a lot of these pieces, so it’s not that common for you to hear someone speaking. The voice acting is pretty well done, but it does take a bit from the overall vibe of the game. The silence, only broken by enemy sounds and machines, really drives home how abandoned the facility is, which is definitely a good thing, so whenever a piece of dialogue is heard, it can break that feeling a bit. There are obviously music tracks in the experience, and although they aren’t too memorable, they’re great nonetheless.

Overall, Mars 2120 is pretty good: it features interesting and innovative gameplay elements and very beautiful graphics. It’s definitely not perfect, though, and has a lot of issues with how it presents the gameplay, and how easy it is to not understand what you’re supposed to be doing. Still, I can’t help but recommend this title to any metroidvania fans, especially given the interesting gameplay mechanic used.