With the release of Red Faction Aramageddon we look at the best Mars games

Red Bull New Zealand
Music & Culture
They Don’t Make Mars Like They Used To

They Don’t Make Mars Like They Used To

by Ryan Smith, 6/06/2011

Red Faction Armageddon will bring back our lost love with the planet Mars, which is why we created this list of the best video games set on Mars.

Arnold Schwarzenegger famously told us to “get our ass to Mars” in the movie Total Recall, but video games have rarely set foot on the Red Planet.

A few generations ago, the fourth planet from the Sun served in old movies, books and even cartoons (Marvin the Martian, anyone?) as the default place from which a steady stream of aliens came to conquer/destroy the Earth.

But science proved that higher lifeforms couldn’t exist there and Mars as a pop-culture destination eventually dried up like the dirt found on the surface of the planet.

But in THQ’s upcoming Red Faction Armageddon, protagonist Darius Mason opens up an ancient shaft on the surface of Mars, awakening a long-dormant evil alien race waiting to kill colonists. To help celebrate the Red Planet’s return to its old glory – here’s a look at the best video games set on Mars.

Doom (PC and Consoles): 1993

Never tamper with teleportation devices. That’s one of the life lessons learned in Doom, in which a portal to a hellish otherworld is accidentally opened by scientists trying to create a teleport to connect Mars and its moons.

The game’s generic Mars-base setting was fairly standard, but the enemies your nameless space-marine needed to conquer consisted of possessed soldiers, fireball tossing imps, giant demons with laser guns for right arms.

It was as if Satan co-wrote a story with Isaac Asimov. Among its many accomplishments, Doom introduced the first-person shooter and the concept of death matches to countless gamers in the 90’s.

Descent (PC): 1995

Mars was just one planet to navigate in Descent, a classic shooter on PC in a bygone era when computer games still came on (gasp!) floppy disks. In it, the player had to steer their way through a series of mines throughout the Solar System to gather information on a virus infecting robots used for off-world mining operation.

Though at times it felt a little too much like a flying spaceship version of Doom – (We have to collect different coloured access key cards in space, really?) Descent was a dizzying blast to play, especially in multiplayer mode.

Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars (Web Browser): 2011

As the tongue-in-cheek title might suggest Adult Swim’s Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars marries the aesthetic of campy, exploitative 1960’s sci-fi with a classic 1980’s style arcade web-browser game.

The gameplay is very reminiscent of Ms. Pac Man – well, Ms. Pac Man if she were a spider queen trying to recapture topless slaves using web spinners.

Red Faction: Guerilla (Xbox 360, PS3, PC): 2009

The surface of Mars boasted a vast amount of buildings in the world of Red Faction: Guerrilla, but not so much by the end of the game’s campaign.

Your job as Alec Mason was to take down the oppressive EDF by any means possible, which usually meant taking structures down with any tool you had at your disposal -- your trusty sledgehammer, explosive charges, rocket launchers, even a gun that literally caused metal to evaporate. It may not have exactly boosted Mars’s property values, but causing mass destruction in Guerilla was amazing fun.