Outpost 2: Divided Destiny

The Good
First of all as you'll find in the opening movies... a scientific disaster has happened. The gist of it is that that there is a planet wide disaster going on and it's having a domino effect on other parts of the planet. You can choose from two factions, Eden or Plymouth... (aka the colonists or the rebels of the original Outpost game, and about the only thing that links the series) and no matter which you'll choose... a good part of the game will be spent fleeing the disaster areas and trying to figure out what's going on.

You'll notice I put all that in the positive area. Because truely, the concept is unique and fun. A typical mission is as follows... setup your base, gather resources, research new technologies and defend against attack.... and then... gather up as much of it as you can and evacuate a convoy of vehicles to a safe place at the edge of the map.... possibly while you're also still defending against attacks. Name another Real-Time Strategy game that includes all that tension?

After every mission, you're treated to a small cutscene animation and a few pages of text storyline in the form of a diary to move events along. Both factions are filled with distrust for one another and the panic of the situation means that most times they probably won't be getting along, even for survival.

It becomes even more interesting when you need to quickly educate children to aid with your research and evacuate certain items and artifacts.. There are plenty of interesting weapon types and ways that you can defend your base and the two factions develop nearly everything differently.

The Bad
First of all one of my major beefs with this game is the cd itself. I believe it to be copy protection, as I cleaned my own CD several times and found not a scratch. The summary is that I distinctly remember spending up to half an hour waiting for the cd to verify and recognize itself between missions and sometimes whenever it went to grab the audio information for background music.

ahem having said that, there is absolutely no good reason this game should have been called "Outpost 2". It seems an especially bad marketing decision considering that "Outpost 1" was so full of bugs as to leave many with a bad feeling over the name. The games are related, but not very much, and the factions could have been easily renamed to anything else without anyone ever noticing.

Also, since the bulk of the storyline is moved along by diary entries, that amounts to a lot of reading. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, there's a lot of text... and most of it is read in a simple window that doesn't even fill the screen.

As for gameplay itself, I can't really think of anything I'd consider too negative about it. perhaps the screen size it too small considering the scope of the action.

Oh I know... there is only one building that repairs units (a garage) and the queueing system for getting your vehicles into the garage doesn't work that well... and is especially bad when you're needing to attend to other things. You must manually move vehicles one at a time into and out of the garage... and there is but a single entry point, which frequently can get jammed. Furthermore your units don't automatically leave the garage when they're fully healed, requiring you to manually select the building, select the unit, wait for it to come out and then give it new orders to someplace on the map....

The Bottom Line
It's Command & Conquer... only you're running away. That's was the original one-line summary of this review and certainly the best way to describe it. The race against time is all consuming and you will see the Blight and the Lava flows appear on the map, threatening your entire operation.

It's also a refreshing storyline for survival and humility as the dream of colonization goes awry. If nothing else, the game is unique. I've never seen anything quite like it and enjoyed playing through both of it's campaigns.