Mars: War Logs
Skip · RPG · 2013
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $4.99.
- Length
- 9h
- Value
- $0.55/hr
- Reviews
- 75% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 512 MB 100% DIRECTX 9 AND SHADERS 4.0 COMPATIBLE, 3 GB of storage. Windows only.
An Intense Cyberpunk Rpg On the Red Planet! Mars War Logs takes you to Mars, nearly a century after the cataclysm that threw the planet and its colonists into chaos. Water has become the most precious resource on the arid red planet, with a few companies fighting a perpetual war for its control.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
May 2022 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 94 in the 13 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 24 percent of the games it competes with. It is cheaper than 68 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Horizon Forbidden West™ Complete Edition ($59.99, scores 70) beats it on value, while it beats BIOMUTANT ($39.99, scores 16).
The press gave it 59; the people who bought it give it 75 percent. A 16-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 11 percent of players ever finish it. On a 9-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 483 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 46 percent of the 271 reviews written there were positive, against 75 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
9 hours to finish it, 19 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.1 times the campaign.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 9 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
75% start to 11% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
4 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I adore the games that Spiders makes. The jank and the clever integration of the main quest with side quests is a very fun romp. This however aint it. The writing is so awful that your "enemies" will become your allies just cause, the voice acting is so bad I'm pretty sure they had no director to tell them what the hell was going on, and the combat is just a slog. Enemies will literally just fart a white mist and...
Mars: War Logs is one of those RPGs that feels like it had an interesting idea on paper, but doesn't fully come together in execution. It's not completely terrible, but it never really finds its identity either. The story is pretty mid overall and doesn't do enough to stand out or keep you properly invested. The combat tries to lean into RPG mechanics, but it doesn't feel like a natural fit for the type of game it...
I remember playing this back in the day on a whim and wasn't expecting much at all. I was surprised to see it had a decent storyline to it, and played it to learn more about the setting. It stood out to me at the time because it was different, and it had stronger writing then most at the time. The only downside was the gameplay itself. The play itself is sluggish responses, frustratingly fighting with the camera to...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Mars: War Logs scores 46/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/232750/mars-war-logsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 6, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.