Surviving Mars is a city building game developed by Haemimont Games, and it is currently available for free on the Epic Games Store. This means that many players will be trying out the title for the very first time, and a variety of questions are sure to arise. Perhaps the most common of these question will be if Surviving Mars supports multiplayer co-op, and this guide is here to shine some light on the matter.
To get right to it, Surviving Mars does not officially support any form of co-op play, nor do there appear to be any mods available that add the feature. As such, fans will need to engage with this strategy game as strictly a single-player offering, and that may be slightly disappointing to those players that had hoped to enjoy the title with their friends. Fortunately, there are some other free multiplayer games on the Epic Games Store for fans that are in the market for one.
To note, there are some indications that a co-op component may have been planned for Surviving Mars at some point during its development cycle. More specifically, the game's product page on publisher Paradox Interactive's website listed that it would have multiplayer in October 2017, five months before the title officially released. However, that mention of multiplayer had been removed from the site by January 2018, and it may have just been an inaccuracy.
Similarly, the game had a multiplayer tag on Steam back in May 2019, which lead some fans to wonder if Haemimont Games had added the feature post-launch. The developer quickly confirmed that co-op was still not an option, though, and there has been no further word on it since then. Again, this tag could have simply been an error, as it could have been with the product listing on Paradox's site, and it is certainly not definitive confirmation that Surviving Mars was ever going to have multiplayer.
Despite the lack of co-op play, fans that have interest in Surviving Mars should not miss out on this opportunity to download the title at no cost. For full clarity, that opportunity ends on March 18, at which point The Fall, an adventure puzzle game from developer Over the Moon, will become the Epic Games Store's free weekly game. Notably, this indie game reviewed fairly well upon its initial release in 2014, and fans of side-scrolling action and science-fiction are advised to give it a look.
Surviving Mars is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.