Well, I didn’t have this on my 2025 bingo card, which is a thing I assume we all have. There’s a Mars Attacks! video game out this week on PC, and more surprisingly, it’s a really fun, if somewhat rough around the edges, theme park management game that plays a lot like a sci-fi spin on Zoo Tycoon and Two Point Hospital.
Cleverly titled Mars Attracts, this newly released theme park management sim lets you abduct humans from throughout history and build a theme park around displaying them like animals while also experimenting on them in horrible ways for science. And also to provide entertainment to your depraved Martian guests. And after spending a few hours with Mars Attracts, I’m both excited to play more and also disturbed by how quickly I turned on humanity in the pursuit of building the coolest theme park on Mars.
Mars Attracts isn’t based on the ’90s Mars Attacks movie directly, but instead is based on the original trading cards that inspired Tim Burton’s cult classic film, so don’t expect Pierce Brosnan and Sarah Jessica Parker to pop up at any point. Instead, Mars Attracts uses the OG card art and lore as its foundation to build out a wild theme park management simulator. And all of the new in-game art created for Mars Attracts is fantastic, perfectly emulating the old look of the cards. I really want some of these loading screen and pause menu images printed out as big posters.
So what do you do in Mars Attracts? Well, you build theme parks. But it’s not as simple as plopping down some paths, food stalls, trash cans, and rides, and calling it a day. The Martians in Mars Attracts are coming to your park to see different human beings from various points in history, like the Wild West and Ancient Rome. Through the use of time travel and UFOs, you send off aliens to go collect humans and items from a given time period, which you then place in exhibits. And while you have some humans collected, you might as well run experiments on them. Not only does this please many of your guests, but it also helps you earn the various research currencies needed to unlock upgrades and new things to build. It’s a lot more fun than researching new tech in other park builders. In those games, I don’t even get to torture and kill one single human, let alone dozens.
Of course, the humans you collect aren’t going to be happy about this situation, so you’ll need to make sure you keep their enclosure clean and filled with food troughs and water dispensers, and not poke and prod them too much. If a human gets too angry and wants to break out, they just might, and you’ll need to call in security to stop them.
And if you have an excess of human beings, you can also just dissect them and use their parts to build new kiosks and entertainment options for your guests. Want to provide your Martians with balloons made out of human lungs? You can do just that, once you’ve killed enough humans. If this all sounds morbid and disgusting, don’t worry. Mars Attracts features a cartoonish and silly aesthetic that makes it easy to have a good time while torturing your human captives.
Mars Attracts is currently in early access on Steam, and while I didn’t experience any annoying bugs or crashes while building out my incredible parks across the game’s first few starting zones, I did notice some missing text and a lack of sound effects. There’s just a general sense that the game isn’t finished yet, which is exactly what I would expect from an early access indie game. I also felt like some parts of the in-game economy felt grindy, and it can be annoying managing supplies when it feels like your workers aren’t doing what you expect. So if you prefer your games to be more feature-complete, perfectly balanced, and…well…finished, then you might want to wait.
For everyone else, if you love building out wacky hospitals in Two Point or building elaborate parks in RollerCoaster Tycoon, I’d definitely recommend Mars Attracts. It’s the weirdest theme park builder I’ve played in a long time, but also a fantastic spin on the genre that sci-fi fans and Mars Attacks lovers will enjoy for hours and hours.