Mars Horizon Review

Mars Horizon is a nice game about running a space program, doing important space missions and eventually landing humans on Mars. It tries to combine two genres and does so quite well. It is a turn based strategy where you decide your long term strategy for the space program and it is a puzzle game when you handle the individual missions.

The gameplay then consists of two parts.
First there is the space program management, where you get to plan launch dates, choose payloads, what rocket parts to use, research, and build out your headquarters. This part works very well, and it is good at making you want to go another turn as you race 4 other space programs to get to Mars first.
The second is a small resource management puzzle about gathering tokens while on a mission. You spend your resources to get more resources and try to get a certain amount of these tokens before you run out of turns. Though it tries to be varied by adding in more and different types of resource/token, it does get repetitive after your first playthrough and you've seen all the combinations it offers.

Both parts of the game rely partially on chance, and give you tools to at least partially negate bad luck. In the space program management, it is your choice of rocket parts, upgrades, and buildings constructed that will let you change the odds to be more favourable. Though the odds here are only for rocket launches. They don't come up often, but when they do it is more tense as a failure could mean your expensive rocket becomes expensive fireworks.
For the puzzle on a mission, you can spend one power point to turn a failure into a normal success. And you're expected to do this fairly often. Every action you take in this has a chance to fail based on the payload's reliability, and you take a lot of actions so some failures are just going to happen. Thankfully this won't explode your payload. A failure on a mission action will usually just inconvenience you with something such as the action giving less resources, or costing more.

The graphics are nothing amazing. They're good for what they show, but they aren't good enough to get people to play this just for its looks.

There are some light negatives. Mostly related to the mission solving minigame. It gets repetitive after a while, and doing many missions will get annoying as the variation isn't really enough to make every mission special. Most of the time they are easy enough to plan out from turn 1 and often things will not go wrong enough to make you reconsider.
There is an autoresolve for the mission part of the game, but it is not a good choice. It is much more likely to make your mission fail than if you were to do it yourself, and it will often fail to do bonus objectives even for the most easy of missions. Using the autoresolve is generally not worthwhile.
The AI cheats a little, but this only becomes noticeable on hard difficulty or above, and some things are unclear unless you double check everything.

Mars Horizon is well worth the asking price and will offer you a pleasant experience. Its flaws only begin to show on second or third playthroughs or if you raise the difficulty. As a whole, it might not be the most amazing game you've played.  But it is a good game, and I would recommend that you give it a try if you enjoy puzzles or games about long term planning.