It starts in 1957 just before the historical launch of Sputnik, but a slightly weird thing that it does is to include ESA (Europe), CNSA (China) and JAXA (Japan) along with the US and USSR as playable entities from this date, and assumes that (for example) the Chinese could have been working on their Long March rockets at the same time as the US was having their Vanguards repeatedly blow up on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Mars Horizon is quite determinedly ahistorical.
It doesn’t project too far into the future with the only properly sci-fi mission you can do being the Mars shot itself ( Mars Horizon does unfortunately buy into the PR guff saying that a manned Mars landing is just around the corner, which quite overlooks the fact that it’s been just around the corner for the last 25 years) but just by pushing the end date forward by another half-century Mars Horizon is, in theory at least, a game with a lot more body than Buzz Aldrin. As this is not a thing that has actually happened in real life yet it gives Mars Horizon a much broader scope, since instead of focusing on the twelve eventful years from 1957 through to 1969 it can instead do the entire history of space travel to date, including space stations, space shuttles, space telescopes, outer planet flybys, the Grand Tour, Mars landers, and even a Pluto flyby if you’re willing to wait the requisite 13 years. Unlike BARIS it doesn’t stop with the Moon landing, though as you might have guessed from the name, the end goal of Mars Horizon is to land a group of astronauts on Mars instead.
Like BARIS, Mars Horizon is a boardgame-esque light strategy game about managing your chosen country’s space agency through the trials and travails of the Cold War-era space race. It is, unfortunately, not anywhere as good as the statement “a modern take on BARIS” implies.
Is it really any surprise that I had it bought and downloaded fifteen minutes after it released on Steam? Mars Horizon is a modern take on Buzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space.
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