It should be said that I am a sucker for pretty much any game set on Mars, just because I’m weird like that. And so it is with great sadness that I say I did not enjoy playing Vermes on Mars. Really, it’s got “Mars” right there in the title, and I didn’t think it was awesome. This is quite a shocker, if I do say so myself. Vermes on Mars for iOS, developed by Aztlan Games, does not deliver an innovative experience.
How is it that I could come to dislike a game that is about wandering around Mars with a team of armed rovers blasting alien slugs?
So here’s the problem. You drag your finger across the screen or tap one spot on the screen to guide your rovers around the map. It’s a little wonky, but we’re all right so far. But we gotta shoot things, right? How do we do that? Well, to switch to guns you must either tap the edges of the screen or double tap anywhere else on the screen.
Then, if you want to shoot your guns, you drag your finger across the areas where you want to shoot. But be careful that you don’t just tap the screen when in guns mode, because then you’ll move your rovers.
Ugh. So you can sort of get the hang of it after a while, but it’s just such a pain. Vermes on Mars is so off-putting from the get-go that many people aren’t going to want to give it the time needed to figure it out. And that’s a problem — I certainly didn’t want to keep playing.
It does have one thing going for it, though: It’s set on Mars.
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