Waking Mars is a 2D adventure game developed by Tiger Style for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Nominated one of the best mobile games of 2012 for the Independent Games Festival.  I grabbed this game in the Humble Bundle for Android 4 which included the Steam key when the game was finally green lit a few weeks later.

I did try this game on my phone on new years day but I got only so far and decided to give it a break when I didn’t know where to go.  I think that was due to the smaller screen, but I also needed a break as my Galaxy Nexus was getting hot and running through battery life quickly.  I came home and started over on the PC and finished it over the course of about 6 hours.

Waking Mars has a very simple premise, your character is an explorer on Mars with a jet pack who find alien seeds and realizes that if he plants them in nearby fertile soil they will grow into plants with differing properties.  The goal is to explore the caves and find a missing robot explorer that had been sent months ahead.

The voice acting and character images seem very “indie” in that they look like pictures of the developers and voiced by the same people.  The whole game I thought the character I was playing was going to turn out to be an android because of his wooden delivery.  Oddly the computer companion the main character has sounds a lot like Claptrap from Borderlands.  The story and acting is not really central to the game though, so it’s easily overlooked.

The game itself is relatively fun and has a few challenging parts where you have to figure out what seed to plant to continue on.

Pros: Interesting jet pack based game, looks pretty good, controls aren’t that bad on PC

Cons: Bad voice acting, bad controls on Android

• Adventure
• Android
• Game Review
• Indie
• Platformer
• Steam