A game like Mars: War Logs doesn’t inspire verbosity, and if I have little to say about the game itself, I have even less to say about its soundtrack. After two competent opening tracks, the War Logs OST crumbles into unmemorable pieces: distant industrial sounds, broad synth groans, and mundane drum beats.
The first two tracks on the album, “Main Theme” and “Arrival at the Camp,” capture a fragment of the cyberpunk edge groped for by the game, albeit rather generically. “Sand Shower” sounds like something that might have been scrapped by Sam Hulick or Jack Wall, and this half-science fiction sound returns time and again. “The End of Innocence” features the same limited sounds, for example, and the “End Theme” echoes some of the other themes without taking those few faraway synthetic noises to a new place.
Even event tracks like “Enters the Technomancer” barely register on the ears. When the music does amp up, as in “Power Struggle,” one hears bland mechanical drums overlaying crunchy synth; we’ve heard it before. The ambient tracks fail to construct any palpable atmosphere, and the “Fight” tracks feel like broken shreds of the same track, strewn about the entire course of the album.
At best a collection of Mass Effect B-sides, at worst a failure of atmosphere and ambiance, the Mars: War Logs soundtrack is a forgettable hour and a half. Forty-four tracks is an impressive undertaking for a single composer, but as each track bleeds into the next, I can’t help but wish more thought was put into fewer tracks. Perhaps all that is needed is a more powerful source of inspiration. Mars: War Logs, after all, probably isn’t going to open anyone’s creative conduit.
The Mars: War Logs OST can be downloaded free at the official Spiders site.
