Focus Home Interactive says Mars War Logs’ wonky English language script and dialog have been completely rewritten and re-recorded.
Mars War Logs was a cool idea that didn’t quite make it. The story of a not-quite-completely-terraformed Mars wracked by war between colonies, it promised Total Recall but delivered something more akin to Mars Needs Women. Among the most obvious issues afflicting the game was the voice acting, which made David Duchovny’s performance in XIII seem downright animated, but that, at least, has been fixed by a major update released today.
“The tight deadlines between the game release dates meant that the initial English translation lacked depth and contained a number of errors; it was then sent to the recording studio, making the job of the actors extremely difficult,” Production Director Luc Heninger explained. “The actual game was thoroughly tested and released with very few bugs on PC, but unfortunately the procedures for the audio and text QA failed and allowed many English localization issues to slip through.”
Heninger said Focus Home didn’t become aware of the extent of the issue until less-than-positive reviews and feedback from gamers began to roll in post-launch. That eventually led to the decision to halt the submission process for the console versions, which were initially due to come out just a few weeks after the PC release, and redo the English translation. An update of the game is now available for free via Steam (and has probably already been applied if you own it), and the new content will be incorporated into the console versions of the game on release.
The seven-minute intro to Mars War Logs, with new dialog, is available now (and is in fact hovering just above and to the right) and while it’s not exactly soul-stirring it’s certainly better than it was. New dialog obviously isn’t going to make this a great game but it’s a solid move by Focus Home that will hopefully go a long way toward making it more accessible, or at least tolerable; there are few things that can spoil a gaming experience quicker and more effectively than bad voice acting, after all, and there’s no question that Mars War Logs was pretty bad.
Mars War Logs for the PC is currently on sale for 33 percent off on Steam, while console versions are now scheduled to come out in September.
