You’ll be sending small unmanned rockets into orbit at first, and it will be a long road until you’re sending astronauts to the moon and beyond, but every action you take will determine your success or failure. You’ll only be able to afford and send one mission into space at a time, though eventually you’ll be handling a half dozen simultaneously with some well thought out planning. Every new mission and mechanic is slowly introduced, giving you new things to learn little by little until you start to get the hang of it. You begin with a modest budget, but your budget comes under review each year, resulting in a larger payroll the more progress you make. While you have your ultimate goal, you begin further in the past, so you’ll need to make smaller steps at first, like launching a satellite into orbit, reaching and landing on the moon, and eventually further and more distant planets. While there’s not really a campaign in the traditional sense, you’ll begin with a few tutorials but then be left on your own to figure out how you want to manage your space agency in a race to reach Mars on a manned mission against other nations. While it is a short experience overall, it took me by surprise with its addictive gameplay once you start to get the hang of all of its mechanics. To give some legitimacy to their game, developers Auroch Digital actually teamed up with the European Space Agency (ESA) to bring some authenticity to their simulation game. While the screenshots may make it look simplistic, there’s a somewhat deep management game underneath that has you leading a space program in the hopes to not only take man beyond Earth’s orbit, but eventually a Mars landing as your ultimate goal.

So, when a decent space management sim makes its way to console, I’m excited to check it out, as was the case with the recent Mars Horizon. Some games like Kerbal Space Program did eventually make its way to console, but it was a poor console port at launch, didn’t run well and was very unintuitive with its controller use. While there’s a slew of management and space sim games on PC, there’s not nearly as many for console players.

Horizon for xbox