Race in Space: SOL Cycling is Zwift on Mars
It’s out of this world. SOL Cycling offers an accurate Martian cycling environment with plenty of special touches. Here’s our first look at the game, which is available in Early Access now.
Our Fragile Colony is Crumbling… and We Must Ride
SOL Cycling drops you on a Martian colony, where human settlers are attempting to forge a new life on the Red Planet. As with every Martian colony ever depicted in any media, it’s not going exactly to plan. With no power and broken supply lines, the colonists turn to their bicycles to transport goods and fix their crumbling colony.
Oh yeah, and they’re not alone. Bug-like lifeforms emerge from the dust to attack you. (Which kind of means you don’t only play the role of colonist in this game, but also colonizer. Bold move in 2021.)
That’s the backstory, but let’s be honest: we don’t really need much justification for riding our bikes on Mars.
An Accurate Mars
It’s a fantastical setting, but that doesn’t mean there’s no grounding in reality. The Mars of SOL Cycling is an accurate recreation of the Red Planet, painstakingly built up from NASA’s terrain imagery.
That means you’re riding on actual Martian terrain, with mountains and valleys exactly where they are in real life. There’s even the Perseverance Rover up there, which you can seek out. The environment, too, is dynamic and true to life, with dust storms, twisters, rockslides, and meteors.
It’s not just about the terrain, but the physics too. You’ll discover that your power to weight ratio is quite improved under the Martian gravity. It’s a kick to cruise along at 7.5W/kg, purely for vanity reasons, but there’s a big speed increase too.
Beyond that, the team has come up with detailed bicycle technology for riding on the Martian terrain. There’s a huge amount of thought and attention to detail that’s been put into this game.
Early Access
We’ll run through features and whatnot shortly, but first there’s quite a big caveat: this game is in Early Access. Contemporary games are always in ongoing development, but Early Access puts the player in the process earlier than a regular release. The benefit is a cheaper price, and many gamers enjoy being part of a game’s development and offering feedback.
That’s especially true of SOL Cycling, which offers huge amounts of transparency into the game’s development. Its Trello boards are open to the public (take a look and see how rapidly they’re adding features), and a Discord server is set to release soon too.
The game entered Early Access on February 6, 2021. It’s expected to remain in this pre-launch status for a year. For what it’s worth, it has pre-launched in a very playable, very reliable state.
All of the above, of course, makes our job difficult. We scrapped our plans for a long-form review this week, in part due to the pace with which the developers were updating the game. We’ll return with a review further down the line, perhaps in six months or so, when the project is more settled.
We’ve got a about a week of gameplay under our belts now though, and we’re ready to give our first impressions.
Compatibility
Starting from the top, then. You login with Strava. It pulls your weight from that service so it can calculate your power-to-weight ratio in-game. Then it’s onto the game proper.
This isn’t for a gamepads, nor a keyboard and mouse: You need a bike to play (technically it does have a running mode too, which we’ve not checked out because we’re not called Runlry).
Compatibility here is particularly good. You can use your smart trainer. You can use your regular trainer/rollers if your bike has a power meter. You can also use the same if you have speed and cadence sensors. You can use your gym’s spin bike.
We tried it with the HR2VP app and it worked perfectly too. In fact, the slightly floaty feel of HRM-based power kind of adds to the space-like experience. Note that an in-game HR to Power feature is now being worked on by the team, so you’ll soon be able to do this natively.
You can pair Power, Speed, Heart, and Cadence sensors, using ANT+ or Bluetooth. You’ll very likely need a dongle for your PC to use ANT+, but those are cheap and plentiful, and anyway everything supports Bluetooth these days. The developers’ Trello suggests that certain device compatibilities are incoming or require improvement, so your mileage may vary, but everything we’ve tried has paired quickly, with no trouble.
In short, it works with pretty much everything, which is about as good as any of these services can offer.
In-Ride Experience and Features
With bike on trainer and sensors paired, there are two places to go: Freeplay or Mission.
Yes, there’s a pretty glaring omission there. SOL Cycling doesn’t have a training mode. At the time of writing, it doesn’t appear in their Trello backlog, so the team’s immediate focus appears to be on the in-game experience.
Within the two game modes, you can also start races and add friends. Unfortunately, the game is so new, niche, and unknown that we’ve never encountered any other users. The team describes SOL Cycling as an MMO (a shortening of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), but at the moment those first two Ms aren’t doing much heavy lifting.
One thing that’s striking from the offset is that your in-game power-to-weight ratio is your w/kg on Mars, rather than Earth. This makes you faster and makes steep climbs easier.
Onto the two game modes.
Game Modes
Mission mode is the main game mode. It’s a Campaign in which individual Missions come consecutively, with the story interwoven.
That’s not to be negative on them though: There’s a real ‘one more mission’ factor in this game. You won’t want to climb off the bike. My first test saw me hopping on the bike in chinos and a shirt to give it a quick spin, only to stay for half an hour with an average power output at 75% of my FTP (and peaks much, much higher).
These missions focus on delivering an object to a destination, or else attempting to reach a destination. Some variety is offered through several minigames and dangers along the way.
These dangers take the form of vicious bugs that occasionally chase you across the map. You can collect a ‘banter,’ which is essentially a force field that protects you from the bugs and kills them when they attack. (The term ‘auto-banter’ did make us think we were about to toss out quips to fellow players as we passed.’) There’s also a gun turret you can collect. Tapping a button brings up the guns in FPS view so you can shoot alien bugs.
There are auto settings for both things, so you can focus on riding without fiddling with a keyboard. But if you have neither of these items, the bugs kill you. You teleport back to a checkpoint a short distance behind and continue your ride. This is disruptive, especially if your focus is more on the ride than the gameplay.
In truth, we’re not keen on the shooting. Timed missions would fit more consistently with the game’s setting and aesthetic, as well as better utilize the technology its players use. A timed mission to deliver a battery before colony loses power would allow the success of the mission to rest on the effort of the rider, while also offering a makeshift replacement for the absent interval sessions.
The story is a little light. That’s not really a problem—what’s Zwift’s plot?—and it’s more than sufficient to tie the missions together. It does seem like there’s more development underway here, with mission cards currently illustrated only by basic sketches.
Individual quests mostly amount to ‘I relaxed in the biodome and woke to a note saying the colony needed a battery.’ There’s no plot that really drives the game just yet, and as much as we feel the ‘one more mission’ factor, we also can’t say we’re especially compelled to find out what happens next from a narrative perspective.
Read with a pinch of salt, because, once again, there’s a lot of effort being put into this mode while the game is in Early Access. Much may have changed by the time you read this.
The other mode is Freeplay. It’s basic: you ride a pre-defined route on the Martian landscape. Along the way, you encounter facts and information about Mars and the Perseverance Rover, even skirting past its landing site as you weave around the hilly terrain. You can also hit a button to point you straight at the rover.
That’s it for now. It’s not exactly a free roam around the entire planet, but a challenging snippet of an interesting area. More routes are planned, and in time it’ll end up like Zwift, where jumping from one route to another is easy.
Post-Ride
When you finish your ride, you can hit a button to upload it to Strava. You can also save the file to your hard drive to upload to your preferred service. This is in the form of GPX and XML files, rather than the industry-standard FIT, which is a little disappointing.
When you open your ride on Strava, you’ll see that you’ve been riding in Ecuador—fair enough, we can’t expect Strava to include maps for Mars.
Annoyingly though, while heart rate and power data are both fine, the Martian w/kg ratio kills some other data points. For example, a gentle cruise came up at an average of 43mph on Strava.
They’re fixing this by offering a setting that lets you use your Earth w/kg instead, though this itself does hurt the immersive Martian cycling experience. It’s just a difficult problem to fix.
Customization
When we started writing this preview, your bike and kit couldn’t be changed. But a swift update added a choice of kits, which you can change on the fly. There’s a menu for jersey unlocks too (Cyclry kit when?!).
This, of course, is still behind the main players in the virtual cycling space. Zwift, in particular, has made collecting clothing, bikes, and components a key pillar of its gamification. So there’s some catching up to do here.
You can also start your own colony. This is just a Strava group, but it’s a neat idea. Your group’s avatar will display next to your name like a flag in one of the coming updates. Events created within this Strava group will schedule a ride with your fellow colonists.
Price
SOL Cycling is currently available for $19.99 on Steam. This will increase next year when the game comes out of Early Access.
Unlike similar services, there are no subscription fees or microtransactions. Just pay once and ride forever. That’s terrific value if the game realizes its enormous potential, especially considering Zwift is $14.99 every month.
However, unlike subscription-based virtual cycling games that tend to offer trial periods within their full ecosystems, there’s no official demo for SOL Cycling. Instead, Steam offers a trial period, allowing you to return games that you’ve played for less than two hours total.
Verdict
Where SOL Cycling sits right now is a very solid riding experience. What it does well is its cycling mechanics, which is reassuring for its long-term future. It’s fun to ride, and the experience feels just right. It’s easily as good as Zwift in this regard, which is no mean feat.
Another area that’s particularly compelling is the attention to detail. There has been great thought put into the setting, which is brought to life through the gear, locations, and technology you encounter. And of course, the accurate Martian terrain at the center of everything, complete with NASA’s rover.
There are a couple of limitations. Firstly, the absence of a Training mode. Secondly, the Martian w:kg is a wonderfully fun idea in principle, but makes data analysis difficult and also makes your Strava look like you’re cheating. And thirdly, the ability to truly roam, or at least a choice of interesting tracks, is noticeably missing from a game that makes its setting so central to its value proposition.
Don’t worry too hard about those limitations: the latter two are already being worked on. We’re not sure about Training.
In short, the experience overall is excellent. There are miles in this concept, though SOL Cycling has entered a packed space with one very dominant market leader. It’ll be interesting to see not only the software direction that the developers take over the next year, but also which audience they focus their attentions on—gamers first, or cyclists.