Since it's the closest planet to Earth, Mars is a popular location for sci-fi. It's a great locale to tell a story about occupying and terraforming it for human life or to explore the mysteries behind it. The planet is also a good backdrop for otherwise normal stories with a more otherworldly feel. Fort Solis is the latest game to use Mars as the backdrop, and it's initially intriguing.

Before getting to the game, special mention needs to be made about the graphics, since this is one of the first games touting the use of Unreal Engine 5.2. On the PS5, this translates into absolutely gorgeous faces. You'll notice this when you move the camera to see your own character shift their eyes and blink realistically. The character animations and mouth movements also look awesome, and they appear more realistic than exaggerated.

While the character movements and facial animations look stunning, everything else comes with mixed results. The environments look as expected for a sterile base on a different planet. The reflections are blurry on some of the glass, which is due to its semi-opaque nature, while metallic walls are imperfect since you can constantly see several hammered-out sections. There also seems to be a lighting and shadow issue, as you can see your character's movement get smeared with bad motion blur when the camera passes over these areas. While it doesn't happen all the time, the dreaded texture detail loading is still present, and it even gets so bad in one spot that it took several minutes before the complete handwriting on a whiteboard could be seen. Whether things like this can be fixed with a few patches remains to be seen.

Like many PS5 games, Fort Solis has both a Quality mode and a Performance mode. Unlike many PS5 games, Quality mode is best when playing this title. Performance mode lowers things to get the game to 60fps, but it only succeeds roughly half of the time — and mostly when it doesn't have to deal with reflections or loads of particles. The big issue happens during the in-game cut scenes where the animations can't seem to handle the jump in frame rate and stutter and skip until you regain control of your character. Quality mode increases the picture fidelity by eliminating the animation stutter, and while the game still drops its frame rate in this mode, the drops are brief enough that some may not notice them. Since this one of the earlier titles to use the new engine, it'll be interesting to see if the PC version has the same issues or if other developers using Epic's new engine on the PS5 run into the same flaws.

Compared to the graphics, the sound is much better. The soundtrack is minimal but haunting; you get the feeling that something is afoot, even if it ends up being nothing once the music stops playing. The sound effects carry things when the music goes absent, and they keep the lonely and oppressive atmosphere going even if the game doesn't do so with distinct surround effects. The voice acting is what really carries the game, and it's a team effort as opposed to relying on the main actors. The script features good writing, but the delivery of each line feels natural with pauses and stutters and the occasional "um" that punctuates normal speech. It makes the various journals that you encounter feel natural instead of scripted, and it serves as a strong benchmark for good voice acting in games.

Story is a big deal in these types of games, and there's an intriguing start to the tale. You play the role of Jack, a senior engineer on Mars who's about to take a well-earned vacation. While out with his colleague, Jessica, to fix some installations before a large storm hits, he gets a distress call from Fort Solis, one of Mars' older installations. As he arrives at the base, he finds no one there, but strange things keep occurring that cause him to question what's going on beyond a potential false alarm.

Like many games of this ilk, the story starts with the mystery of the purpose of the base and why everyone is missing. You stumble across some normal things that provide incidental info, such as the fact that vinyl records still exist and that streaming for pro wrestling and movies is still a thing. The environments are laid out in a way that every amenity is taken care of, like vending machines and poker tables. The various audio and video logs provide a good idea of how life was before you got there, and it paints a picture of life that started out well, but overbearing bosses and paranoia lead to the events that you discover as the game progresses.

Without spoiling anything, the premise starts off well, and the reveal of the antagonist is somewhat surprising, but the game reveals only the barest of intentions for the actions. You know that there's sabotage and the events caused the antagonist to take action, but you have no idea if any of it was justified because there's nothing in the game to suggest how dangerous the initial concerns were. During our playthrough, we found 91% of the documents but didn't encounter a big reveal of how bad things got, and there's little motivation to try for 100% in case nothing more is revealed.

As far as gameplay goes, you'll go around the environment trying to collect key cards to open locked doors. You'll interact with various objects, some of which deliver important parts of the story and others are just for fun, like messing around with a climbing machine, an abacus or Rubik's cube. Some of the chatter is with your partner over radio communications, and other times, you'll simply talk to yourself. Combat is nonexistent, and there are a few puzzles that provide challenges as you continue to explore the environments.

There are several things that players may be irked about throughout the game's relatively short journey. The first is your inability to run. Some corridors are long, and some of the rooms are sizable. While there is nothing chasing you and no dangers to run away from, your character always moves at a plodding pace and needs a wide berth to turn around. Even when your character seems frustrated, the only running that's ever done is during cut scenes. It almost feels like a deliberate stretching of game time since you'll spend a good deal of time walking around and not doing much else.

Another issue has to do with the legibility of the messages you find. All of the text messages and video logs are either displayed on decently sized monitors or your wrist-equipped multitool. If you're using a monitor and sitting close to it on a desk or sitting close to your TV, then you may be fine, but the text is quite difficult to read if you're sitting a normal distance from the TV in a decently sized room. It gets much worse if you're trying to read the text on your map, as it's miniscule unless you stand and get close. The only way any of this is readable at any distance and any configuration is if you get out of the game, go to the Extras section, and read every letter log; the move isn't convenient for most players, let alone console players.

Puzzle quality is another issue, but you won't experience it in the game's first half because those puzzles are very easy to solve. Once you reach the back half of the game, the puzzle difficulty goes in the opposite direction, where solutions are obtuse or you get frustrated that the solution requires you to slowly walk to switches. Even worse, there's at least one puzzle that initially seems like it links to nothing at all. The good news is that only one or two of these are actually needed to progress, so it's no big deal to overlook them, but that doesn't make up for the variation in difficulty.

Finally, Fort Solis is pretty bad with button prompts during Quick Time Events (QTEs). There are moments when you'll barely notice the button prompt since it blends in with the background. The timer for these button presses and analog stick movements are also quick enough that by the time you notice them, it's too late because the window has passed. They don't result in instant failure, but you will feel compelled to restart the section, and that isn't a big deal since the game saves often enough that it doesn't take too long to return to that event and try again, armed with the knowledge of what to look for since the prompts don't change.

Your impression of Fort Solis is going to depend on many factors, with the biggest one being how forgiving you are of its issues. The story seems fine until you break down motivations. The graphics look good until you start looking beyond the characters. The acting is good, but the gameplay isn't as tight as it should be due to some odd design decisions. It is a game that might be fine for fans of modern story-based adventure games, but don't expect it to be anywhere near the height achieved by some of the bigger titles in the genre.

Score: 6.5/10