Spiders is a company of lofty ambitions, still holding on to the faded glory of cinematic RPGs from the Bioware era but unable to meet its demands. This was true when they released Mars: War Logs too though it's almost endearing to see how rough their initial attempts were. Despite still not having reached the bar set by old Bioware, they have continued to make incremental improvements with every game and for that they have my respect.
Anyway coming to the game itself, I find it a bit odd that it markets itself as a cyberpunk game. Setting wise if you squint your eyes it might be true on a technicality however it carries neither the themes or the visual motif of traditional cyberpunk media. Here the "corporations" are in change but that didn't happen because of the rot of capitalism but rather them just having the most resources after the countries collapsed so now they act as pseudo countries themselves. There are no themes of profit chasing, humanity sacrificed for progress because these corporations are barely holding on and going to war for the limited resources present on the planet Mars. It would be more apt to call it post apocalyptic. Having said that, I find the setting the most compelling part of this game for its uniqueness alone even if its a low bar.

I could rag on about how dull and lifeless the characters and the story is, how repetitively and clunky the gameplay is along with its maddening backtracking for quests and it would deserve it. It is not a game I would recommend to most, even a RPG fan but I want to take the time to highlight why I even bothered to finish it. There's a surprising feeling of authenticity to this fictional Mars that Spiders had crafted. The grimey dusty brown shithole of a world sells an almost Fallout meets Midgar like dystopia where water is so scarce that you use sand to wash yourself. There are no heroes in this world and everyone is doing the best they can to survive for the little resource there is but that doesn't stop the usual bigotry, power struggle between classes that humanity always has dealt with. People use "serum" as currency which is probably just water or some sort of fluid and given how rare it is, you have the option to kill enemies you defeat to extract it from their body. The equipment you find all fit scavenged and jury rigged aesthetic everything has and Technomacers add the added fantasy spice to make it more compelling.
All considered it's an interesting setting and if the writing and gameplay problems are fixed I could see it becoming a cool franchise someday.

As the name suggests, the game takes place on the red planet Mars. The story of the game is that the planet has been thrown into chaos and a hundred years have passed since the disaster. The colonies living on Mars are now fighting for survival in this new world order. Water has become the most valuable resource and various groups on Mars are constantly fighting for it. I couldn't play the game long enough to finish it. The gameplay and graphics are very old now. If I finish it in the future, my review may change, but for now it is like this.

I played Mars: War Logs because I started The Technomancer and realized it was a sequel to this game. It is inoffensive, but didn't surprise and impress me quite as much as Greedfall did (the only other Spiders game I have played).

This is a comparatively small-scale game, you only travel through a few locations and the stakes don't feel particularly high. The factions and players here are pretty generic and nothing very surprising happens throughout the course of the game. The narrative sort of gestures at having multiple points of view by having a companion character narrate in the beginning, but you only ever control our boy Roy, so it doesn't really come off that well. Roy himself is what you would expect... a mysterious hard-ass with a dark past. It is an excuse to use a bunch of magic and beat people up, but I wasn't very interested in the characters or story.
The writing and localization is a bit rough as well, but tolerable. Dialog is heavy-handed (though not overwritten) and the subtitles rarely match the voice acting (which is actually not too badly done).

Gameplay in Mars: War Logs is fairly generic melee combat with some electricity attacks thrown in. It feels pretty bad at first, but was more tolerable to me than the melee in Greedfall. By the end of the game, with a few defensive options and technomancer powers opened up it started to come together, but this is no Dark Souls.

Visuals are... pretty terrible, unfortunately. Animations are stiff and there isn't a lot I can say about the character models that is positive. Roy himself looks ok, and his equipment reflects modifications you make to it, which is a nice touch.
The game takes place entirely in three areas, all of which are on Mars, so everything is pervasively red and dusty. Unfortunately every environment also uses basically the same assets, so it all looks identical. You can see where Spiders' ambition collided with their budget here.

The game was short so I don't regret playing through it, but there just isn't much of interest here. This is actually the sort of experience I expected from Greedfall, to be honest, but the setting and execution just don't come together as well in Mars: War Logs.

A testament to how I would play anything that labeled itself as cyberpunk in 2013. A period in which my intellectual curiosities were insatiable, but comprehensively poisoned by the desire to have it all filtered through video games. There is nothing of substance in this game. It has learned features from the cyberpunk games that inspired it but has not learned how or why to use them. Looking back on my longing for cyberpunk material to digest (which would become a quest to eventually learn of the much more intellectually healthy genre of solarpunk) I can only come to the conclusion that not much has changed in the world of cyberpunk video games. People into cyberpunk will literally play anything that presents itself as cyberpunk. With several exceptions, it's an intellectual wasteland, excavated of all value, with the sensitivity, depth, and thoughtfulness that supposedly defined the literary genre completely absent. It's empty symbols that vaguely allude to something better from a different time.